Storm of Iron
by BaronVladimirHarkonnen
Summary: It is the 41st Millennium. Warmaster Perturabo readies his 14th Crusade as Abaddon readies his next Black Crusade. The Wolftime has come, and the hour of destiny is nigh. The Lost Ones return and are found, and as the Primarchs reunite, Chaos flexes its own strength, gathering the Fallen Ones. I do not own 40K, GW does.
1. For Want of a Nail

_Bridge of the Vengeful Spirit:_

Horus Lupercal, Warmaster and victorious commander of the Legions of Chaos, stared at his father, the mighty Emperor and Master of Mankind. Looking with contempt at his father over the corpse of his brother, the blessed Sanguinius, he kicked the corpse forward, callously leaning forward and smiling.

"Is my dear brother Perturabo here? I do hope his mediocrity didn't harm you in the Siege of your Palace, my callous betraying gene-sire."

The Emperor looked at Horus quietly, his Sword beginning to glow with the sheer essence of his own Psyker abilities.

"You are a fool, supposed Master of Mankind. Against you the Lords Four have raised a great banner. They would grant Mankind all that it wills, they would make us still greater than ever we imagined ourselves to be! You are a timid weakling who cowers before the great Gods, but if you in your timidity knelt before me, I will spare your life. I might even keep you as a jester to my own court as the Emperor Lupercal, Master of Mankind by the will of the Gods!"

The Emperor looked at Horus.

"No mortal is the master of Chaos. It uses you, you do not use it."

Snarling, Horus prepared crackling energy only to see Perturabo marching toward him. With a sudden and swift movement he hurled the blast at his brother only to his surprise to see the Iron Warriors Primarch easily dodge the electricity, raising a bolter whose presence caused both Horus and the Emperor to register shock and a strange reaction.

As he noticed this, Horus also saw his own abilities seemingly weakening.

"Horus the arch-traitor, you shall atone for all your crimes against the Imperium! Against our father! Against our brothers, slain on the battlefield of Isstvan V!"

Horus growled with a rumbling bestial tone.

"If Rogal Dorn hadn't joined me, you would not have been overly concerned about this. You might have even joined me, your precious world a bonfire."

Perturabo smiled, a grim, cruel, and more than somewhat sinister smile.

"It is more than true that the mere presence of Dorn and his sons as traitors made my loyalty an assurance. But I know now, my dear brother, why my Legion was so over-stretched. I know which skulking coward attempted to break us, to make me burn my world. I know which maniacal egotist engaged in such a crime against not only nature and the rationality that Imperial Truth might have brought, but let a galaxy burn because his precious ego was offended.

I never did trust my father's wisdom in making your Warmaster, and this foul civil war you have unleashed only validates that distrust. In the memory of my brother Ferrus, a martyr to your war, and to the blessed Sanguinius, my bolter shall humble even the strutting monster who adores the so-called Gods in the Warp! I have had explained to me by the Sigilite the nature of what you serve.

These are no Gods, these are the manifestations of all the evil and filth in the universe, an evil and filth you slake as long as you draw breath. Even now other Primarchs rally to our cause."

Growling, Horus strode closer to Perturabo, who saw the chink in his brother's armor and suddenly formed a very grim smile indeed, one that brought Horus to a halt.

"Tell me, willing servant of the Warp, what happens to those addicted to Chaos if you are struck by bullets hallowed with the power of Blanks?"

Horus's eyes suddenly widened and he took a step back.

"Yes, brother, weapons hallowed by the blood of a Sister of Silence your treacherous betrayers slew."

With that he fired his bolter four times, the strikes ones Horus attempted to disrupt with the electricity he'd stored up but the rounds passed harmlessly through the electricity and slammed into the chink in his armor. Four perfect shots, the kind only a Primarch could make. The weapons hallowed by the power of the Blank struck Horus with a resounding set of wet thuds that led the Arch-Traitor to roar in pain.

As he staggered back, Perturabo took from his back the massive Thunder Hammer that he'd made infamous in his vendetta against the traitor Dorn and the legions of Horus in that order. The mighty _Worldbreaker,_ product of Olympias, hallowed by the power of the Lectio Divinitatus. It was a gilded Warhammer, glowing still further with a crackling orange energy that took blasts of electricity from Horus and dissipated them harmlessly.

As he strode forward and raised his hammer toward Horus, his downward swing was blocked by none other than his father. The reason why was apparent, as Horus had sunk to his knees, blood not stopping, his face no longer glowing with the fell red light of the Warp. Instead he was crying, looking at his father and Perturabo.

"I see it now." The rumbling power was gone. The voice was a quivering whisper of a wreck, of a shell where there had been power.

"You were right. They lied to me, they deceived me, they made me betray everything that I was. Father, I wish to die as myself. Don't let Perturabo kill me for vengeance, when the red haze of anger fades it will never sit well on his conscience." The Emperor looked at his son in a mask of despair.

"You are right, my son. Forgive me for failing you, as I failed all humanity. I wished that people could triumph over the most bestial elements of the Immaterium with their own highest instincts. Man was not as much as I believed him to be, nor the supermen I made in my image." Sighing, the Emperor then turned to Horus and a sudden and powerful blast of Soulfire flared, Horus dying with a smile as his soul was utterly eradicated and spared the attentions of the Chaos Gods.

There, on the bridge of the Vengeful Spirit, stood the Emperor and then the legions of Chaos began to prepare to flee. As the Emperor teleported his sons and servants away, he returned to his palace and to the Golden Throne, architect of his misfortunes. Looking at it he saw a glimpse of a future that could have been, his body a rotting corpse maintained by the sacrifice of thousands every day. Immobilized, the only sane man in an insane universe stuck in perpetuity.

Sighing, he then sank to his knees for hours as his sons arrived. Guilliman, Johnson, Khan, and Perturabo. An alliance of demigods, consoling the broken God whose tears wept for the future he had envisioned, and in recognition of the future that would be. After a couple of hours, the Emperor rose and turned to his sons.

"I expected that I would die in the battle with my son the Warmaster. That in death I would serve the Imperium for ten millennia until this device failed and I sank to death, a species failed."

He pointed to the place where the psychic residue of Malcador remained.

"Before he died, I told Malcador to prepare for the future. One unbreakable shield against the coming darkness. One last blade forged in defiance of fate. A legacy to the Galaxy I conquered, and one last gift to the species I failed. Then I expected to die, and now because of the strangeness of fate," and he here he looked to Perturabo with a strange gaze that mixed sorrow and wonder, "I live."

He stood up and told them, "My sons, the Imperial Truth has failed spectacularly. Much as it pains me, I must endorse the very words of Lorgar, and make them a truth to unify humanity. No longer their Emperor," he sighed deeply, "now a God-Emperor in Holy Terrra, assailing my foes as needs be. This Heresy has broken my initial weapons."

He rubbed his face with his armored gauntlet, another deep sigh issuing from seemingly within his soul. For a moment the ageless giant seemed very old indeed and weighed down with the pressures and weight of all those years. The moment passed.

"The battle on the _Vengeful Spirit_ will lead the traitors to flee into the Eye of Terror. Though it may defy conventional strategy, I shall let my traitorous sons and Astartes flee. We have lost so much on Terra that must be rebuilt first." The Emperor sighed.

"Malcador sealed the Warp-Rift in Terra, and paid for that with the ruin of his life and body." He looked to his sons.

"Today is the first day of a new era. The age of enlightenment and empirical truth has ended, my sons. Now we face the age of darkness, where there is nothing among the stars but slaughter and the thirst of laughing gods. My first aim to destroy Chaos has failed. It may be that this second one will also fail over the course of the Long War."

His sons, now with the rest of his Primarchs, his loyal ones, who still lived and who'd arrived and straggled in, appalled at the detritus of the battle before and around them gathered around him as he raised his sword and they all raised their weapons.

"We may not be able to defy fate," the God-Emperor vowed, "but we shall give the Ruinous Powers such a death of the human race that they shall tremble in their Hells. And perhaps, if the first approach failed, that second shall succeed. To the glory of the human race!"

The Primarchs as one shouted, "To the glory of the human race!"


	2. Perturabo goes to Pythos

It is the 41st Millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the God-Emperor of Mankind has ruled the embattled Imperium from the Imperial Palace on Terra. He is the Master of Mankind by the will of the Gods, the conqueror of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. His armies are led by his Warmaster, Grim Perturabo of the Iron Warriors, the sole Primarch left alive and functional, masters of a new Dark Age of Technology.

He is the Golden Lord of Terra, in whose name billions die every day with a song on their lips. In his secretiveness the Emperor prepares new plans to repair the ravages of the Horus Heresy, manipulating the timeless aspects of the Warp to his aims. By his will the great Astronomican that guides humanity through the stars burns, and when the Emperor and his Warmaster direct their armies personally, the armies are unstoppable.

Greatest of all his soldiers is Warmaster Perturabo, whose Iron Warriors are the greatest among the Adeptes Astartes, rivaled only by the mighty Warlock-Warriors of the Grey Knights. Among their allies are the ever-vigilant Inquisition, the fanatical Adeptes Sororitas, and the Imperial Guard to name only a few. But all their strength is barely sufficient to hold against the ever-present threat of Chaos, of daemons and of mutants corrupted by the foul powers of the dark gods.

To live in this time is to live in the time of ending, in the most cruel and barbarous terror imaginable, yet it is a time of mighty heroes, of bold deeds, and great courage. And as the Wolf-time draws ever nearer, the Imperium shall need its heroes as it has never needed them before. Science, reason, and technology, the greatest achievements of the human race, these have been forgotten in the Long War. Forget compassion and understanding, for there is only war in the grim dark future, but an eternity of slaughter and death and the thirst of laughing Gods.

XXXXXXXX

The Warmaster's flagship Olympia Maximus:

Warmaster Perturabo, last of the Primarchs, returned to his ship and his Trident, his mightiest Warmsiths and masters of the Iron Warriors. He'd just finished visiting Guilliman, always a moment that was deeply moving and sorrowful to him. Of all his brothers, only Guilliman and Johnson were left with bodies intact and fate known. He knew nothing certain of the fate of his closer friends like Jagatai Khan or Leman Russ, and he mourned what he believed was their certain death. He alone, the Primarch assigned in the old days before the Heresy and for some time after to the least rewarding and favorable jobs, was left now.

The Iron Warriors had eschewed the greater style of most of their fellow Legions, becoming experts in maintaining and reviving ancient technology to rival the Adeptus Mechanicus. In all the Long War, Perturabo had suffered only one defeat that burned into his memory in perpetuity, the horrors of the Iron Cage. His mocking counterpart across the realm of Chaos, Rogal Dorn, had baited him into a perfect assault he could not resist. 200 of his best sons had been lost there.

Perturabo, alone among the Primarchs, had been supremely ruthless even before the Heresy, and he had only been moreso afterward. It was understanding of this tendency to what lesser things like mankind might deem paranoia that had led his father and Guilliman to place him in command of both the Inquisitions and to serve as the guidance and joint commander of the new Grey Knights Legion as well. Where Perturabo marched, so fell the foes of the Imperium by tens of thousands, by hundreds of thousands, by millions. Where Perturabo and his father marched, even the Greater Daemons and the accursed Daemon Primarchs fell before them.

The Soulfire that could cleanse others had claimed in an apocalyptic battle in the First War for Armageddon his failed brother Angron. Angron the mad brute, madder still, beaten by Worldbreaker and the sheer power of his father.

His father spent much of his time in the labs from whence he and his brothers had come, working on what Perturabo knew would be a second generation of Primarchs. He didn't see anything to object to given how many of his brothers had fallen. The memory of his brutal confrontations with his Daemon-Prince Arch-Foe in the so-called Black Crusades of Abaddon the Despoiler burned each time.

Refusal to continue to stalemate had led to his approaching his father with the view to weaponize blanks as he'd done all those years ago. It had taken several thousand years, but his plans bore fruition. New Great Crusades aimed at the Eye of Terror had begun to rip and tear into it, causing it to slowly shrink and wither.

Perturabo looked over at the world of Pythos. Here some very unusual things had occurred. Abaddon the Despoiler had personally taken command of an invasion on the world, an invasion that in spite of the…..other Warmaster…..having personal command was able to be effectively challenged by mere humans of the Imperial Guard and a single Founding Brother of the Grey Knights.

Aware of the interest of the Dark Angels in this campaign and their secretiveness, and the potential for Azrael and Draigo to miss the real goal of Abaddon in pursuit of the war, Perturabo had invoked his power as the Warmaster and brought a massive force of Grey Knights and Iron Warriors, including his Trident.

Kroeger, the Hammer of Justice who broke the Warp on his blunt and brutal approach that struck only toward his foes with overpowering force. Vull Bronn, his Stonewrought, the mightiest master of fortification short of Perturabo himself, and Falk, the Warsmith's Warsmith. Each of them were landing with drop pods, keeping close eyes on the presences of Azrael and Draigo.

Perturabo himself had access to one of his father's new weapons available only to the Primarchs. By the ill fate that led to Lion'El and Roboute being entrapped in their stasis fields in dreaming death, these had fallen to the safeguarding of Perturabo. Aware that his brothers were sleeping, however, he entrusted to them to safeguard the will of the sleeping Primarchs, to enable them to direct their legions.

These were the Star-Choir, Psykers of tremendous power who specialized as a kind of highly secretive and strongly shielded against the Warp set of messengers. They had confirmed to him the presence of a most interesting Grey Knight, a Psyker of awe-inspiring force whose presence gave him a hint as to why Abaddon would risk an overt confrontation.

Aware of this, the Primarch then made his decision. He, with his Iron Circle, would land not near the Psyker but near Abaddon. The Despoiler might wish the Psyker, but there would be no means for him to refuse the challenge of a Primarch, the Last of the Loyalists. Perturabo grinned.

Before, he had only fought his fellow Daemon-Primarchs or entire armies, and with the exception of Dorn his abilities to weaponized hallowed power and marry that to his mastery of fortification made him victor over countless worlds. Now he would finally be able to punish the impudent whelp who'd taken the place of the Arch-Traitor. Activating his teleportation technology, Perturabo and his Trident and Iron Circle all vanished in a blinking of glowing light.

XXXXXXXXXX

For the 183d Imperial Guard regiment, the sight that was about to greet them was little short of awe-inspiring. For the Forces of Chaos it was this and a sight that made even the most fanatical of cultists suddenly turn a bit more jaded. The crackling light of teleportation had appeared and as Azrael grinned at those who'd challenged him, his expression turned to one of shock. Before them all stood Warmaster Perturabo, successor to Guilliman and Horus as much as Abaddon himself.

Even by the standards of the Space Marines around him, Perturabo was an intimidating and terrifying sight. His armor retained the shape of the days of the Heresy. It was, however, enhanced as reflected the greater power and brute force of a Primarch. Even Abaddon seemed taken aback by the appearance of the massive Primarch, and his Chaos Marines were stunned as well. Then the greediness of the desire to say that they'd defeated the last of the Imperium's Demigods took over and Perturabo, feeling the enhanced power of the reverential awe of the masses of Loyalists around him brought out Worldbreaker.

"A good day to die, Daemons!"

And with that the grand Battle of Pythos began, and the first of the great schemes of Perturabo as a prelude to the next Great Crusade into the Eye of Terror…..


	3. Warmaster vs Warmaster

_The Battlefield of Attika, Pythos:_

"Tell me, Horus-manx, is it a trinket this time? A soul? For what purposes have the vomit of the fell inclinations of mankind and the xenos called you forth now?"

Abaddon's eyes widened and then he snarled.

As Corpulax lumbered forth, Perturabo sighed and then as Worldbreaker glowed with the same eerie energy it had first displayed all those centuries ago he swung it with a blinding speed that tore clean through the body of Corpulax, igniting the ashes. Smiling with a sinister and terrible grin, Perturabo said to Abaddon, "I have not come here to bandy words with your simpering magggots, Arch-Traitor. You shall face me, or I shall brand you here and now before all your followers as no False Warmaster, but as a coward worthy only of the least condemnation."

Abaddon snarled. The Primarch had spoiled everything again. Perturabo's Great Crusades were eating into the Eye of Terror. The Anathema was still pursuing the thrice-accursed Webway schemes by new approaches largely veiled to the eyes of the Ruinous Powers. Two of his Black Crusades had been directly spoiled by the very appearance of Perturabo and his Trident, and then the God-Emperor and his Custodes.

This had cost him the most grievous loss in his Long War, the monstrous Fabius Bile whose aid had been essential in keeping the recruits of the Chaos Legions going. The memory of the Master of Mankind, in full power as a God, stabbing Bile through the chest with his glowing sword and the beam of Soulfire that had condemned Bile to ashes with the last words that Bile had heard from the Master of Mankind a growled, "Your blasphemy is atoned for," still sent chills down him.

But the Primarch was correct. He could not allow the challenge to go unheard, not after his last two failures. He'd barely squeaked by with his superweapons even as his prestige was heavily damaged in each case, but attaining those goals had kept his Masters from turning on him in full. Now….he needed Epimetheus very badly. He needed him or he'd have to go to his masters in full failure, not partial.

Activating the power claw with a glowing crackling energy, he shouted, "So, Primarch, you dare to challenge the Warmaster of Chaos?"

Perturabo, body veiled in an orange light, growled, "You are not a Warmaster in any sense save that which the vomit of mortality deems you. Falsehood is not truth, no matter how its mewling braggarts seek to mislabel themselves thus." As Abaddon hurled himself at Perturabo, the Warmaster of the Imperium allowed his Iron Circle to unleash a protective warding circle, a product of the new Age of Faith.

Abaddon smashed against the circle, and as his claw sought purchase managed to land on his feet, hissing.

"So the mighty Primarch hides behind a shield, then? Are you a coward?"

Perturabo's grim smile did not change.

"You call upon your Gods for aid, and they answer you. Why then should I not call upon my own father, a father in truth and not like your own?"

The Primarch laughed, a sound like boulders grinding together. "My father respects me and listens to my guidance. Yours? Horus Lupercal betrayed the Imperium and he abandoned you to your hatred and attempt to anathemize him!"

Abaddon roared and swung at the shield with his power claw. The clashing energies of magic created a shockwave that flattened all save the Grey Knights, and even they left deep grooves in the ground where the energy drove them back, and displayed both drops of blood and whisps of smoke from the strain of holding to their feet.

With a slight gesture the shield fell and then Perturabo swung his Worldbreaker, catching Abaddon by surprise with the sheer speed of the attack. So too with the force of the blow, something that was a reminder of all the Empire had lost when his brothers had fallen asleep. The blow was of such sufficient power to hurl Abaddon into the sky, but calling upon the gifts granted to him by the Gods he managed to catch his fall in mid-air and lunged downward again, only for Perturabo's hammer to smash away the claw and for two rounds of his specialized anti-Warp bolters to strike into Abaddon's face and armor.

The Chaos taint on his armor made it permeable enough that Abaddon actually roared again in pain. So what Angron had told him had been true after all. Perturabo and the Grey Knights were, in the end, actually capable of hurting the Greater Daemons. He realized then that there would be no means to face Perturabo and salvage his original and true aim, or so he believed.

It was then that he saw Epimetheus sneaking up on his flank and as his eyes turned toward him, Worldbreaker was hurled in a two-handed swing by Perturabo, the swing capitalizing on every inch of power that both his armor and Thunder Hammer and the veneration of the Imperium's countless billions could give him. The blow came near to tearing off Abaddon's lower jaw and as it was, his blood sprayed out and he fell.

As he glared at the Primarch, who placed the hammer in front of him and his hands on the hammer, the Warding Field re-appeared.

"Are you going to kill me, Anathema-servant?"

"No."

The word stunned him.

"You have the enemy of all your accursed Imperium, servants of the False-Emperor all beholding this, and you will not kill me?"

"No. Not to me is it given to be the hand that kills you."

Abaddon then saw a vision from Tzeentch warning him to flee. If he did not soon the Master of Mankind would be present. He would need to cut his losses and let the Bloodthirster and Emerald Cave Prisoner lead the fight, as there was naught else he could do. Snarling, he swung his knife as the legions of the Warp began to manifest anew, and he laughed as he vanished into the crackling energy of a teleporter. Even as he did so, a brilliant golden light in the form of an Aquila appeared, and the legions of the Warp howled in dismay.

The Imperium's servants fell silent, and all, even the Warmaster, fell to their knees. The Imperial Guard and Inquisition prostrated themselves, speaking the Litany of Faith, while the Astartes knelt on both knees, hands raised in reverence at the sight of the deifically empowered entity. Behind him manifested three other forms in light, something that made Perturabo, kneeling on one knee smile genuinely.

He would at last have new battle-brothers, new Primarchs to take away the loneliness and to aid his father in the time needed to pursue his great quest.

The three Primarchs of the Second Founding looked at him.

One was very tall and massive, having elements of the old Horus in his physical appearance but crackling with the Psychic potency of Magnus.

The Emperor himself was between the Primarchs, and the other two manifested in armor very like those of the Grey Knights.

The Emperor gestured to all three of the new Primarchs, saying, "For ten thousand years I have labored to give my Grey Knights Primarchs worthy of their quest. To you I have given the Primarchs of the Second Founding, the hands that wield the unbreakable sword, the arms that bar with the Unbreakable Shield!"

As he spoke, the mightiest Daemon of Khorne roared in a challenge and they first saw the manifestation of the Prisoner in the Emerald Cave. The God-Emperor smiled.

 **+You have no places here, Daemons of the Immaterium!** +

The Daemons roared and burbled, respectively, before the Emperor spoke two words that shook the entire army and all the Primarchs, New and Old alike. The Daemons were appalled as he then favored them with a cynical look.

"I have spoken your true names! Depart now and your armies with you into the Warp from which you came!"

With that, the daemons suddenly vanished in a foul and sickly cloud as the Emperor turned to his three new Primarchs.

"Serapis, Adamantius, Aquillius, this is Warmaster Perturabo. When I am not on the field of battle personally, his orders are to you as mine own. Of all my Primarchs he has been my hammer, my indispensable terrible swift sword striking across the battles. I wish that you, my new Primarchs, work together with your chapter to dispel the remnants of Chaos on Pythos. My Warmaster and I have a task to accomplish in the Webway. When we are done, we shall send my flagship to take you with us to Terra. Great events shall finally be afoot, my sons."

With a crackling sensation the Emperor and Perturabo vanished.

XXXXXXXXX

The Imperial Battleship _Ferrus Manus:_

"Where are we going, Father?"

"Simple, my Warmaster. We go to the Webway, to the Dark Eldar city. Your brother has languished too long in their captivity these last one thousand years."

Perturabo's eyes widened.

"Jagatai's alive? Is he uncorrupted?"

His father's smile was genuine.

"Yes, he is alive. Between the two of us, it should not be long in freeing him."

Perturabo smiled, also genuinely.

"With the new Primarchs, and with my brother returned…the new Great Crusade shall be still greater than ever I imagined."

His father's hand went to his pauldron.

"The Eye of Terror will close, my son. And it shall never haunt your dreams again."


	4. Nightmares and Dreamscapes

_Secret Prison, Cormorragh:_

When the God-Emperor and his Warmaster manifested in Cormorragh, the dissipating energy seared into the buildings around them. The Dark Eldar sentries around the prison of Jagatai Khan were stunned by the light, and still more stunned by the towering figures that presented themselves before them. It had been an act of great risk to take captive the powerful Mon'Keigh warlord who'd torn through the Webway and destroyed entire fleets of Corsairs on his own. An act of madness, in a sense, that had torn the heart out of armies.

Now it had brought the Mon'Keigh's father, the terrifying God-Emperor of Mankind, a figure of dread power who was carving still a distinct new path among the Webway and who had spent many centuries personally butchering entire communities of the Dark Eldar in alliance with their 'redeemed' weakling kindred. A colossus in golden armor whose very body emanated a light that burned with the fires of Order. A light before which the sickly warp-light of Cormorragh was as nothing, burned away and the eyes of the Eldar turning dark, almost like a mask.

The wrath of the Emperor was terrifying to behold, and there was no less a sense of fear in the grim Warmaster, the Primarch of the dreaded Iron Warriors whose firearms and dreadful Iron Cages had been the doom of many a Dark Eldar fortress. The Dark Eldar soldiers prepared to call upon the dreadful Power that enslaved them only for the crackling light stored up in the Emperor's Power Claw to blaze forth, searing them into ashes, their bodies crumbling. Others, deterred from seeking to face the glowing God in their midst turned for the Demigod.

A mistake. A very, very painful and dreadful mistake. Worldbreaker was in their midst with a speed that seemed unnatural given the immense hulking armored form of the Primarch. Speed for speed no Space Marine or Primarch would match the Dark Eldar, but with the added power granted by the veneration of the billions among the Imperium of Man, it was more than mere raw genhanced power that struck. Each shatteringly bloody fatal strike of Worldbreaker was a blow to avenge the captivity not merely of a battle-brother but in the hopes of Perturabo that his alone times were coming to an end.

Between them, they made good work of the entire set of guards, and then they came to the prison. The Emperor simply clenched a fist and a blast of light smashed the door in. From it, they heard a voice:

"Father?"

It was Jagatai Khan, who stood, having snapped the neck of his captives, bloodied yet unbowed.

"Father? It is you!" Grinning, he then knelt before his father as he saw Perturabo smiling and nodding toward him.

"Perturabo?"

"He is my Warmaster now."

Jagatai blinked.

"Come, my brother," as Perturabo extended his arm to him. The Khan took it. Before them, the Dark Eldar rose in power, the most elite of the Lord of Comorragh's soldiers rushing at the Emperor, only for the Emperor to place his sword by his side and summon to his hands a vast staff that he'd built for just this kind of purpose in the Long War against the Traitor Legions.

The Emperor raised the staff, body glowing with his own Psyker abilities and the power of the Faith of the billions of the Imperium. The staff slammed into the ground and a brilliant flash of light and a howling gale incinerated wide swathes of Comorragh. By the time the light dissipated, the Emperor and the two Primarchs had vanished and a significant portion of the jail was gone and a near-quarter of Cormorragh's manpower with it.

XXXXXXXXX

On the Emperor's flagship, Jagatai Khan listened with a fascinated glance, leaning inward, breathing heavily and lightly as elements of the story registered to the story of where things had been since he'd vanished early in the 30th Millennium.

"So, I take it a lot's changed since last I vanished."

Both Perturabo and the Emperor nodded.

The Emperor spoke, "When last you left, Roboute was still Warmaster of the Imperium, and the Traitor Legions were driven to the Eye of Terror. It was not long from your disappearance that he met a brutal fate at the hands of Fulgrim and Mortarion."

Perturabo nodded.

"The two Traitor-Primarchs, one fallen into the utter abyss that is the Warp, the other not entirely so as yet assailed him on Maccrage. Perturabo fought with him, as he did with all of you when the time was needed."

The Warmaster nodded. "So I did. In what the superstititous now call the Battle of the Four Primarchs, Roboute fell into a terrible coma, and I ended up retreating with him after breaking Mortarion's leg with Worldbreaker sufficiently to a point that Fulgrim decided to cut his losses. Even the fell daemons of the Warp cannot simply abandon their masters' pawns.

Corax, Russ, Johnson, they all fell too."

His face grew haunted with a terrible memory.

"In the Second Black Crusade, however, as the Traitors called their wars against the Imperium," he sighed, "Dorn drew me into a terrible trap. His price to ascend to a daemon prince of Chaos, and he did so with what he termed an Iron Cage. I was drawn into it in hopes of destroying him and stopping his ascension. 200 of my best warriors, and my first Trident, were destroyed. But the rest escaped, and I with them.

It was when I returned, learning that Russ and Corax were gone, that I was appointed the third Warmaster of the Imperium. Successor of the Traitor, and of Roboute. And for ten thousand years I waged my Long War against the threat of the Traitor Legions, no knowing that was the next millennium that the new threat appeared for the first time. The first elements of the Tyranid Hive Fleets. The Necrons have also awakened. Ancient Artificials, animated by a perverse faith in their Star Gods, intent on waging a war until life is a silent tomb as coarse and brutal as their own."

The Emperor spoke, continuing his own side of the tale, "For ten thousand years the Long War has been waged. Elven grand False Crusades waged by Abaddon, inheritor of Horus. In that time Perturabo and I have destroyed Alpharius and Omegon, and we have been the strongest arm of the Imperium against the Daemon-Primarchs. It is thanks to the mighty deeds of Perturabo and his Iron Warriors that the Long War is less hopeless than it would be. He deciphered a means to use the Blanks, most obscure of all Psykers, and to take the concept of Servitors. For each False Crusade aimed at the Imperium, a Great Crusade into the Eye of Terror has been launched.

We have shrunk the Warp-wound by a third, though it continues to bleed. The last False Crusade was two thousand years ago, since then the Imperium has largely fought Necrons and the Tyranids. We estimate the Hive Fleets we've faced thus far are but miniscule portions of overall fleets that are striking at the Galaxy from straight head on and below. The Necrons…." The Master of Mankind sighed, "They have been more straightforwardly dealt with as they appear."

"It has been too long, brother." Perturabo smiled with an unusually generous smile, "I have fought alone too long. I am glad you have come back to us."

Jagatai nodded. "Ten thousand years?"

His eyes widened.

"I get to command my sons again?"

"You do," the Emperor said, and he smiled, taking Jagatai's hand in his own.

"And you will be able to meet your new brothers as well, my new Primarchs who command my Grey Knights."

Jagatai blinked. "So Perturabo and I will have Battle Brothers to accompany us?"

"You will."

XXXXXX

That evening Perturabo was shaken by a strange vision. Terra was bleeding light, strange and eerie veins of glowing gold that marked the planet in an unnatural pattern of bizarre geometric configurations. The Imperial Palace oozed that same unhallowed light, but he was hovering over it in a jump-pack, awed and crying for reasons he did not understand. Within the Palace he could see and not see an immense man in armor mutating into a strange many-angled being with angles that should be obtuse acute and with a curiously cubic aspect, and then the brilliant flash of light began to ripple out as he escaped with the last survivors of the doomed Earth into his flagship, the Iron Warriors solemnly beholding the birth of something new and terrible, the last of humanity's home left, and Perturabo alone refusing to ascend to this perverted future, now the Master of a still more shattered Mankind ravaged by the deadly birth pangs of a new and unhallowed deity. The moment passed. But Perturabo, who sank for a few hours into a Sus-An coma shaken by what he'd seen didn't understand what to make of it beyond the impression that he would need to evacuate as much of the population of Terra offworld as he could, to preserve some last traces of what was in the wake of what would be…..


	5. Blood and Iron

**The Imperial Palace, Terra:**

Jagatai Khan looked with awe at the Imperial Palace.

"I knew you were beginning to rebuild it after I'd vanished. Truly did you have a greater gift to build than even with fighting."

Only after he'd finished that statement did the Khan realize that what he'd intended for a compliment might be seen as an insult by the Warmaster of the Imperium. But instead of reacting violently, Perturabo favored him with a surprisingly human smile.

"That is Father's own view, now. He believes had he allowed me to build from the beginning that I might have been still more steadfast than I was. But I complain not."

Jagatai, seeing his White Scars beginning to assemble and glorying in the prospect of greeting his gene-sons, then paused for a moment.

"When I left to pursue the Dark Eldar into the Webway, I remember that our dear brother Roboute was breaking up legions into chapters and that I told him I'd see him in Hell, first. How did you preserve the Iron Warriors as a Legion?"

Perturabo smiled with a sad and slightly bitter smile, and he spoke, "My brother heard directly from me in my own words that I had not fought on Father's side against someone who dissipated the strength of the Iron Warriors to allow the victors against the False Warmaster to achieve by diplomacy what he had not by blood and iron."

Jagatai blinked. "Ah, I thought you'd gone to pursue Dorn."

"No, not then. Not yet. Roboute gave me a task I believe he intended as an insult to make me turn and fight him and achieve by blood and iron what he understood diplomacy would not. Instead I took my Iron Warriors and we rebuilt Ultramar after his great war with the Word Bearers. The heretics we burned, the Ultramar children we interned in great mausoleums."

Perturabo grinned.

"When Roboute returned we'd rebuilt his empire such that he looked upon me with awe and said that it was an error to have assigned me to dig in the mud, for I had found Ultramar brick and left it marble. First time I'd ever heard such kindness from his lips."

Then he sighed, "So he allowed me to retain the IV Legion as a Legion, something that meant I was able to break Dorn's Iron Cage even if I couldn't stop the wretched bastard from becoming a filthy thing of the Powers."

For a mere moment in time Jagatai caught in the sudden coldness like boulders grinding together of Perturabo's words a hint of a Perturabo who could have been, a mighty colossus of merged iron and flesh enhanced by the powers of the Warp.

"I was drawn after the Battle of the Four Primarchs into the Iron Cage of Dorn, seeking to avenge my fallen brothers, and perhaps to die myself. Dorn tried to persuade me to join the Ruinous Powers, saying that while they adored having him on their side, that I was their original desire, not him. He believed such words would have won me over, and that they were praise."

Then Perturabo smiled again and the smile did have a more than vaguely sinister element. "Alas for Dorn I simply smashed him in the face with Worldbreaker and he and I had our last interaction as human beings."

For a moment, after this, Perturabo was silent and then he made another longer, all too human sigh. "Ten thousand years alone. We may be demigods, creations of the Master of Mankind, but whatever else our Father is, a parent he is not. I have missed having my battle-brothers to fight beside me, to wage a war along side me and to strengthen the race of mankind as it must be strengthened."

The moment passed and he then clasped Jagatai's hand and the two raised them in a mutual salute, "So I am deeply grateful to have you back, brother, and to have one less burden taken from my shoulders. Ten thousand years have left me, a man already prone to dourness and paranoia only the worse for this. The Imperium, due to Father's focusing on building and raising properly and blooding properly his new Primarchs, and due to his destruction of the Alpha Legion, has taken more from me than it should.

Alone among us you believe in freedom as it should be. The Imperium can only grow the greater with the Khan and his White Scars at last working hand in glove with the sons of Olympias, the Grey Knights, and the Iron Warriors and all the Chapter-Astartes."

Jagatai smiled.

XXXXXXXXXXX

Before the Imperial Palace the White Scars were assembled, not knowing quite what to expect. The rumors of their Primarch's return had filtered amazingly fast, and the idea that the Warmaster was at last allowing them to assemble not as chapters but as a Legion entire, this had drawn to them curiosity. The Legion, recreated in the old lines of the Horus Heresy-era organization, was many times more immense than it had been, some eighteen to twenty times. Yet all of the Space Marines in it were awed when the Warmaster and the Emperor appeared.

The Emperor took their salutes by raising his sword that flashed with fire and unleashed a tongue of flame into the air, and then withdrew slightly that Warmaster Perturabo might speak:

"Children of Chogoris! After many long years, I give you the fulfillment of your ancient dreams! Behold, the Khan who redeemed your world and has at last come among you once more!"

Jagatai stood forth, raising his sword and hearing the cheers of his Legion, and his eyes moistened with tears of gratitude. The father then spoke to his sons, promising them "Vengeance against the treacherous Dark Eldar wherever these foul xenos appear unabashed and unshamed in the realms of the Imperium! But above all else, we are now once more a Legion in full! The days of the Guilliman Codex have ended, my sons!

I, your Primarch, am among you once more and we shall unleash without hesitation the greatest and the most destructive power of the old days that all the Immaterium shall tremble at our approach!"

The roar was deafening, but Jagatai relished it. It was time indeed to prepare his own legion to fulfill whatever the designs of the Warmaster and the Emperor, Master of Mankind, were.

XXXXXXXXX

 **Laboratories of Fabius Bile, Eye of Terror:**

Fabius Bile smiled at his Replicae Projects. For many long years he had sought to create his own ultimate product, the mightiest of all possible weapons, a servant to Warmaster Abaddon that would make his latest Black Crusade worth more than ever he could have imagined. With the addition of what he had hoped and craved for from the Dark Eldar, gathered in the wake of the presence of the Master of Mankind in the destructive clash in their world, he could at last achieve it.

His tanks were active, and within a span of a few hours as the Eye of Terror defined them, he would at last have both his ultimate weapon and a means to even depose the Despoiler and grant Chaos a proper leader, a Counter to the Master of Mankind. The clones of the Emperor, whom the Primogenitor intended to have battle one another for superiority so that he could present the winner, grew apace.

Fabius savored the irony, feeling like the Emperor himself in the Himalazian Mountains gazing upon his Primarchs. As he looked, he was startled when one of his creation's eyes opened, and the being within the tank suddenly looked at him. He would be still more startled when crackling lightning-spikes of Psychic energy began to course from the tank as his creation began to flex its muscles.

All of a sudden Fabius realized that perhaps, with some things, the wanting of them was better than the attaining of success…


	6. The Eye of Terror

**The Eye of Terror, Harmony:**

Abaddon the Despoiler looked with anger and contempt upon the towering figures that loomed before him. Once, in life, the thing immediately before him had been Lorgar Aurelian, Primarch of the Word-Bearers. Now it was a Daemon Primarch, a ruined and twisted type of lifeform. To his left was the Daemon-Lord of Medrengard, ruler with an iron fist of the Imperial Fists, the Sons of Dorn, the most fiendishly conventional of Chaos's forces. Before his campaign to Pythos and his failure to attain the vessel for the Avatar of Slaanesh, he'd found himself in the favor of the Powers.

Now, with a true failure at hand, Abaddon was faced with the reality that only now did the Daemon Primarchs seek to take their own roles into conventional space. The tall and monstrous figure that had been Aurelian spoke with the ruined and twisted vocalizations of the Warp, the terrible howling of the Neverborn, a voice that chilled even one as hardened as Abaddon.

"The Ruinous Powers do not favor you so much now, Despoiler. Many are your successes in your Black Crusades, but it only takes one failure to anger Them." He laughed, an ugly sound.

"Long did I meditate on that world, but when you well and truly failed, Despoiler, until Their wrath aroused by your failures awoke me to return to this Long War at last. You were sent to draw a vessel for a God, and now, upon your failure, the Dark Prince has vanished."

Abaddon straightened.

"How does a God vanish?"

The Daemon Prince laughed, a cold and cruel sound. "A feral world near the Eye of Terror, one of the few places where the cores of the races made by the Old Ones grew, was overwhelmed at last by the Ruinous Powers and cast into the Eye. A stripling-deity held by the Lord of Changes broke free of his imprisonment and led a doomed bid to withstand the conquest of a Feral World within the False-Emperor's Empire. The stripling failed, but he was reborn as the God-King of Sigmaron, and in a quest to initiate a strike with his daemons against ours, a set of his allies, debased relatives of the Eldar, overcame a glutted and fattened and enfeebled Dark Prince with ease."

Rogal Dorn's echoing bellow that had once been a rumbling basso in life followed, "And so the Ruinous Powers at last entrust to us command of power within the Materium. We shall begin, Despoiler, by unleashing a secret weapon that has been hidden within the Imperial Palace all these years. Did you think that an eternity of suffering in a stasis field was something even Guilliman could endure without seeking a way out?"

Dorn's smile was terrifying. "Roboute has at last fallen to the Blood God. We have awakened him and he has healed indeed. Let our father the so-called God-Emperor see what happens when he faces another of his sons who has fallen even as the skulking Khan comes crawling back to him." The terrible laughter of Dorn and Aurelian echoed and re-echoed in the Palace that the Despoiler used as a base, the sound of the endless and ethereal madness of the Warp enhanced with the raw destructive force of the Primarchs.

Temple of Guilliman, Terra:

The Temple had for a change been cleared of visitors due to the amazement surrounding the return of Jagatai Khan. Only two Ultramarines remained on guard, and that was fortunate. Within the field, Guilliman's eyes opened, turning black as his gauntlets began to flex. A deep bestial sound echoed, as his body began to move. With a sudden overpowering force the Stasis Field shattered as Roboute Guillliman stood up. Already a towering man as a Primarch, he grew double in height and half as wide in breadth, his feet transforming into hooves, his hands manifesting claws.

Out of a blood-like hue he formed a great club and his rumbling and now malformed voice hissed **Blood for the Blood God**.

Terrified, the Ultramarines remained fixed in place and the thing that had been Guilliman struck forth, the spiked red club hewing them in half with trivial effort, savoring the smell.

Striding forward, he then saw before him in a sudden flash of light three figures. On the right a tall man in armor, with a truly magnificent mustache wielding an equally epic sword. On the left, the new Warmaster who'd succeeded him, Perturabo. In Perturabo's hands was the massive maul Worldbreaker, which had destroyed countless foes of all kinds in the name of the God-Emperor of the Imperium. And in the center the figure whose ever-shifting face did not detract from the majesty of his golden armor, a figure whose light nearly blinded him.

The Emperor said to his son, "I am sorry, my son, that you have fallen."

The thing that wore his son's flesh spoke in an unhallowed fashion that rumbled through the Temple: **So the False Emperor comes before me with his cringing stripling sons. I shall take great pleasure in hewing the flesh from your bones, Anathema.**

The Emperor remained silent, and then as the monster surged forth with blinding speed, the sword of the Khan and the hammer of Perturabo sliced and smashed into him with sufficient speed to hew off one of his legs and force him to the ground as the Emperor, without breaking a stride stood in front of him.

The monster's leg remained hewed but he suddenly swept both his hands, hurling both of the other Primarchs off, while grasping his club to raise himself up. Using it as a crutch he formed a blade from the same substance that had formed into the club, howling the name of Khorne as the Emperor raised his own blade. The blade of the Blood God swept downward and the firey sword of the Emperor blocked it, before the Emperor's crackling psychic abilities surged forth and cleaved through the blade, sweeping to the side and cleaving the club, knocking Guilliman back down.

As the Emperor glowed, his eyes flashed with fire. Guilliman hissed: **You made me into th** -the blast of Soulfire cleansed his body, shattering his soul as Horus's had been shattered. No promise of restoration, no sense of hope from the return of the Prince of Ultramar. Only death and the laughter of thirsting Gods. That day geologists monitoring events on Terra noticed something frightening, a strange golden band of psychic light began to emanate beneath the Imperial Palace, a band that began to spread and spider-web across the planet. The resemblance to the warnings of the dream of the Warmaster Perturabo led to a quiet acceleration of the steady evacuation of the Infrastructure of Terra.

 _ **The Malcador, the Imperial Flagship:**_

As the Emperor teleported himself and his sons to the ship, he sat upon the great throne that was always there on any ship the Emperor used. Fashioned into the form of an immense golden lion in honor of his son, Primarch of the Dark Angels, the Emperor gazed out quietly.

"Where shall we go first, Father?"

Perturabo, his hammer slung at his back asked the question as his gauntlet stroked his chin, studying the map of various worlds where far-flung foes assailed the Imperium. Their father's eyes glowed as his voice echoed with the power of a figure of divine proportions, one whose power had only grown the greater after millennia of worship.

"Solemnace. We go to rescue your brother. My agents' psychic reports have finally reached me and I have pinned his location down at last. Vulkan lives, and he is held by the supposed Necron Lord Trazyn the Infinite. He shall be Infinite no more."

The two Primarchs nodded.

"We shall take with us," their father continued, "two full Legions. The entirety of the White Scars and the Iron Warriors. They shall hold the Necrons' attention as I free your brother, and ensure the destruction of the Tomb-World thereafter. When I give the signal, you shall withdraw your men and I shall hold the Necrons fixed upon me until I unleash the Imperial Exterminatus."

Both brothers nodded and as Jagatai grinned with anticipation of a true battle, Perturabo's usually dour face was likewise marked.

"As Warmaster, Perturabo, you shall command the vanguard and three chapters of Ultramarines as well as your Iron Warriors. You shall engage his forces in the field. The Scars," as he turned to the Khan, "shall ravage and destroy his artifacts, serving as the beaters to draw out the Necrons that the Iron Warriors and Ultramarines shall annihilate them. Vengeance shall be ours."

The Emperor then smiled as he said, "To war!"

The chant of the gathered Primarchs and captains of the Legions and Chapter Masters was deafening and heady:

"Revere the God-Emperor, expel the Xenos!"


	7. Solemnace Crusade: Planetfall

**Solemnace, Citadel of Trazyn the Infinite:**

The Necron Lord looked at the skies around his world with a detached serenity in his green eyes. There was something appropriate, if strange in the sight. The God in Gold was going to storm his world when he ran out of means to divert his searchers. This was, of course, rather inevitable, really. So came the long-awaited reckoning. He was, however, stunned at the sight of the raw psychic power of the Emperor unleashed in wrath, of entire Necron fleets dissolving into fire and ash cluttering up the Void.

The Malcador, the Olympias, and the Chogoris. The flagships of the Emperor, his Warmaster, and the first of the Lost Ones to return from the far reaches of space. Against them the vast fleet that Trazyn the Infinite had amassed, and with the God's wrath unfolding in sheer destructive scale the fleet might as well have been kept in reserve for all the good it did. Trazyn was no longer mortal enough to snarl but the blazing of his eyes was evidence enough as to what that meant.

Vast armies of warriors and Canoptek Spyders and Canoptek Wraiths were being gathered, but the ability of the psychic powers of the Emperor to shatter entire ships full of highly trained void fighters without much of any resistance did not augur well for resistance. Oh, his armies might inflict some damage on some of the Astartes, but whenever Necrons faced the Iron Warriors they were incapable of inflicting equivalent damage as to other forces.

The personal Legion of Warmaster Perturabo not only struck in overpowering force but eschewed lighter armor for tremendous enough firepower to even rock the vast armies of Necrons on their heels. The Iron Warriors had even obliterated two entire Tomb Worlds in full, the only time anything outside the Warp had done so. The degree of shock this induced meant that the Necrons were intent on avoiding drawing Iron Warriors to their presence.

And now the Warmaster and his entire Legion were bearing down on him combined with Ultramarines and the entire gathered White Scars, a Legion of whom the Necrons knew very little. All things considered, he hoped it would be a good battle. The forces of the Imperium made planetfall, as to be true was in all cases inevitable. When the Master of Mankind personally commanded armies, there was nothing the Necrons could do to crush him or the armies he led. Indeed, the power and faith in the might of the Emperor that coursed through the Astartes, supercharged by his presence, meant their Gauss weapons were capable of inflicting deep scars and boiling injuries but not being outright fatal.

The Imperium's forces made planetfall, the sons of Chogoris sweeping forward, their Primarch in the van, his sword deftly tearing through Necrons as though they were nothing. The Warmaster for his part led his Trident, the belligerent Kroeger storming through the Necrons with nothing to hinder him, the towering form of Barban Falk an immense and unstoppable tide of destructive force drowning the vast armies in Necrodermis with next to nothing to hinder him. So too with Forrix, whose immense Thunder Hammer smashed apart the Canopteks with next to nothing to withstand its swings.

And before all of this, the immense speed and skill of the Warmaster was something to behold. In his improved and modified Cataphracti armor, the Warmaster's speed and devastating force mixed in with that of his Iron Circle meant that entire armies seemed to wither before the Primarch in half the speed that they had with the Iron Warriors. Where the Iron Warriors maneuvered, immense rolling waves of firepower smashed aside what the Necrons hastily constructed.

Necrons were marked by capably directed walls of firepower, the siege-inclinations of the Iron Warriors carrying with them steel storms of such power that even Necrons could not fully withstand them. Trazyn cursed in a low burst of binary, realizing that the Imperium had caught his forces in the midst of preparation, precisely when they were most vulnerable. So it would be a war, then, and one where he had the disadvantage. His orbital forces were scattered, and both the Emperor and the Warmaster and now a second Primarch were overtly engaged in war against him.

Inside Trazyn's palace, Vulkan rose to his feet, grasping his Thunder Hammer. He heard the sound of warfare beginning and when he looked out to see the onset of landings by Imperial forces, including his own father, a part of him relished at last being freed from the silent scream, knowing that it was his father's psychic presence that had done so. As he grasped his hammer and strode forth to face Trazyn's guards, Vulkan grinned with a smile that was chilling enough that had the Necrons been beings of flesh and blood they would have quailed.

He spoke: "The hour of vengeance is nigh." The hammer began to swing and Necron bodies were blasted apart as he sought to break out of the palace. Sensing the psychic presence of his son, the Emperor and his Custodes soon zeroed in on that presence. Activating an aspect of his Psyker abilities he seldom used directly on the battlefield, the Emperor left to the Warmaster for a few moments direct command of his forces as he and his Custodes appeared in a flash of light where Vulkan's hammer swung through the Necrons.

Vulkan's eyes widened. "It is you, father."

The Emperor nodded.

As more Necrons arrived, the Emperor's eyes glowed and his Power Claw crackled with a blue witch-fire and then a sudden roiling column of the flame lanced out, smashing and annihilating an entire column, before being used with sufficient power to tear down an entire wall of Trazyn's palace. As the Primarch of the Salamanders went with his father in the sudden maneuver back to the battlefield, Vulkan found himself facing the sight of the swiftly moving Thunder-Hammer of Peturabo.

"Brother."

Perturabo smiled genuinely. "Brother."

He pointed to where the Khan on his bike was lancing through Necrons, disrupting cohesive forces and rendering them dislocated wrecks.

"I doubt the Khan would mind if you joined him in demolishing Trazyn's hordes." Vulkan grinned and waded forward, his hammer destroying Necrons by the tens and then the hundreds, scattering their bodies with such force that the Necrodermis could not fully repair itself in their presence.

Trazyn, who'd rushed back to his palace just as the Emperor had left, realized that the Emperor had already attained what he wished this early in the fight. No, it wasn't a good battle. If, however, he could manipulate things properly by manipulating what reserves were available to him on planet, it might be a war he could still salvage. Judging by the degree to which three Primarchs and the Emperor were annihilating his forces before him, however, that was a rather open question.

For the Primarchs, the chances to fight together on the same battlefield for the first time in years was one of splendor. Where the Khan's terrible swift sword hewed down the Necrons with impartiality, dealing blows of such splendor that the metal could not repair itself, the blinding speed and devastating force of Perturabo made him seem a veritable titan of Iron behind whom the torn metal grew the greater. Vulkan's thunder hammer swung with abandon and glee, vengeance at last achieved for thousands of years within Trazyn's collection room.

The armies of the Necrons had been caught in the midst of preparations to withstand an invasion and so their reactions were punch-drunk, slow. Numbers that might have prevailed even against the Primarchs and the Emperor were wasted in dribs and drabs and piecemeal assaults easily beaten back by the superiority of the war-waging power of the Ultramarines, White Scars, and Iron Warriors assigned to fighting on Solemnace.

In the skies, Void warfare denied the Necrons the chance to send reinforcements, the brutish firepower of Iron Warriors ships combining with the tactical virtuosity (if predictability) of the Ultramarines and the swiftness of the White Scars to negate any prepared aspect of Necron counterattacks. Indeed, the under-lords of the Necrons soon decided that such attempts were futile and decided to leave Trazyn in his fate. If he drew the Iron Warriors to Solemnace, then may he burn on his own pyre of arrogance.

The battlefield was a familiar sight, the glowing green energy of Necron Gauss energy contrasting with the shouts and screams of Imperial Adeptes Astartes and the destructive power of their chainswords and chainaxes as they tore through their armies. Trazyn the Infinite himself, gazing at the chaos soon issued an order that he ensured was forcibly followed. His armies would retreat to the devastated palace and there dig in. Perhaps he might not win the battle, but if he made the Emperor's sons bleed and his Asartes rue the day they faced him, he might extract from them such infamy that the name of Trazyn the Infinite would never be forgotten so long as existence itself endured.

The armies of the Necrons withdrew with a surprising degree of effectiveness and skill, while other armies across of Solemnace were sent there as their first orders. With a swiftness typical of the former servants turned slayers of the Star Gods, the partially gutted palace became a fortification. Recognizing what Trazyn intended, the Emperor spoke to his Custodes and then to his Primarchs.

"If the monster wishes a fight, to him a fight shall be given." Taking advantage in turn of the chances provided them, Vulkan was assigned to command the Ultramarines chapters on-world, the Chapters forming the right, the Ultramarines simply grateful that their Primarch's fall didn't rebound on them or the Master of Mankind's trust in them. The Iron Warriors formed the centerpoint, and for a change did not mind the chance to ply their trade in the trenches beneath the gaze of the Emperor. The White Scars formed the left.

Expecting to command a siege, Warmaster Perturabo was surprised when the Emperor revealed a different plan. In lieu of giving the foe the fight he wished, the Emperor wished instead to exploit the very weakness of the circular defense Trazyn was building. As the Primarchs listened solemnly, their faces as one became marked by mutually carnivorous smiles. The gathered might of two Legions and two chapters maneuvered in turn a week later, heading to Trazyn's palace. During the week's lapse, a full-strength force of Imperial Guard was added to augment their numbers and to provide a diversion to hold Trazyn's attention just long enough for the greater plan to work.

The Tomb-Lord stood impassively, holding the Empathic Obliterator. As he expected, the foolish servants of the Emperor and their sniveling Godling had merely gathered a great army of Astartes only to send ordinary humans in a set of hammering attacks all around his lines. Whatever struck everything, in the end, could not break through anything. He was serene until the news hit him that under the direct command of the Emperor and the Warmaster, a tremendous column of Space Marines led by all three Primarchs was striking at a point in his line where the Imperial Guard had withdrawn…..


	8. The Fall of Solemnace:

**The Citadel of Trazyn the Infinite:**

By any objective standard the tremendous mass of Necron forces surrounding the castle, even at a weak point, were among the most numerous foes any force of the Imperium had faced since the Ullanor Crusade and the Seventh and Ninth Black Crusades. Objective, however, did not quite cover a battlefield where at the vanguard was the God-Emperor of Mankind, clad in ornate Artificier armor, and his son, Warmaster Perturabo, the grim Lord of Iron.

Nor did it cover the figure of splendor and dread wrath that was Vulkan the Undying, his baroque armor now a thing of dread and not mockery even to the undying Necrons and their skeletal frameworks. Nor, in truth, the glorious sword-work of Jagatai Khan, who in spite of bringing a sword to a battlefield riven and marked with some dead Astartes (and the Apothecaries salvaging their gene-seed), many more scattered Necrons and the glowing and terrible psychic might of the Master of Mankind.

Such was the power of the Emperor and the group of Custodes behind him that the forces of the Necrons withered, as the Iron Warriors and the White Scars and Ultramarines successfully exploited the initial breakthroughs to tear through the lines. The Necrons, once more caught off-guard, were unable to concentrate or reverse their positioning in sufficient time to thwart the joint determination of the immense might of several full-strength legions of the Astartes and three Primarchs. A sight not seen, at that, since the Horus Heresy.

Within his palace, Trazyn sat on his throne, aware that he was now facing his own downfall. Well, if that were so, then he would seek out the Master of Mankind and give the golden-armored godling a fight to reckon with. The Necrons, after all, had slain Gods before…..

 **The Eye of Terror, Abaddon the Despoiler's Base:**

The monstrous creature that had once been Rogal Dorn gazed at the small band of figures that resented all that they had done for their gene-sire only for the great resenter at being forgotten to forget them in turn. A single Grand Company of Iron Warriors in all the Long War had fallen, and that recently in the Thirty-Ninth Millennium. Abaddon had hesitated to make full use of these servants of the Ruinous Powers but with him in bad odor, the Daemon Primarchs had no such hesitation.

Dorn looked at Warsmith Andraaz, and in particular at the chain but arrogantly smiling appearances of the two Obliterators. Obliterators, figures of dread and horror that only appeared at times with the Imperial Fists, and then seldom as completely as they did with the Iron Warriors. Of course Imperial Fists tended to fall more toward Khorne. In seeing the Iron Warriors' confidence and their ability to withstand the Eye of Terror, he realized then why the Powers had sought them all those years ago.

Remembering that he was seen as an inferior second choice drew Dorn's wrath and he rose to his feet, but as he readied a blow he halted. He was a Daemon Primarch, these striplings were mere mutants. What use wasting wrath on the undeserving.

 **Warsmith Andraaz,** his voice boomed with savage satisfaction, **you are assigned a task on behalf of the Ruinous Powers. Go forth to the Iron Warriors garrison on Armageddon, and strike your brothers. Be sure to make full use of Merihem and Oriax, and especially Over-Captain Honsou, for seldom is it given to a Chaos force to have two such warriors. The End Times are rising, go forth to strike as the herald of Outer Darkness.**

The Warsmith knelt on one knee. "As you will, Lord Dorn." Power claw crackling, the Iron Warriors, with their two Warsmiths, Andraaz and the renegade Kraegon Thul, vanquished Lord (and last of an entire Grand Company) from the world of Malodrax entered ships. It was with a kind of latent excitement that they did so. Now, after their brothers had forgotten them, it would be at last that an Iron Warrior band that went the proper direction would strike.

While Merihem and Fabriax were the most blessed by the Ruinous Powers in one way, only Andraaz had been fully blessed by all of them. Indeed, to a degree, these blessings had made him almost a second kind of Daemon-Primarch, less a formerly post-human demigod of War and more a resurrected shade to a degree of Lupercal himself at the height of his powers.

As Dorn looked to Abaddon, the deep sneer and grinding teeth of Abaddon showed Dorn that the insult had set in properly. Good.

The Citadel of Trazyn the Infinite:

The Emperor and his Primarchs had entered his citadel, and thus was it that Trazyn strode forth to meet them.

"So, Godling, you have broken my lines. I call to you to a contest of champions. I, the Tomb-Lord of this world, versus the Master of Mankind that superstitious apes worship as their God."

The Emperor's sword burned with fire.

 **+Challenge accepted.+**

The use of psychic power as a response was a deliberate goad to Trazyn, and in the wake of the ruin inflicted and the ease with which the Imperium was able to dismantle all that he'd built, with the realization that even as the Emperor accepted the challenge the Space Marines and Primarchs were looting what was useful and annihilating and burning the rest, all combined to make the ancient Tomb Lord less the strategist with long-term plans he'd envisioned himself as and more a revenant howling for revenge.

The Empathic Obliterator lanced forward only to for its blows to shatter on the Emperor's own shields, at which point the Master of Mankind unleashed a set of targeted witch-fires that severed Trazyn's hands, and then another set that severed his feet. Falling to his knees, feeling the Necrodermis starting to slowly heal itself, he merely gazed at a God that beheld him in wrath, raising a terrible sword that burned with flames.

The sword lanced out and a blast of Witch-flame seared the Necrodermis, cauterizing it. Trazyn's husk fell dead, the blast of Witch-Fire just sufficient to prevent his body-hopping by a narrow margin. With that, the Emperor sent a telepathic order across the Legions: **+Fall back to your ships. We shall depart from there and unleash an Exterminatus upon this Tomb World.+** With that, the Iron Warriors and White Scars and Ultramarines, and the three Primarchs, made a withdrawal against a surprisingly punctured resistance.

As they withdrew into space, the Emperor's eyes glowed with the same golden hue that Perturabo had seen in his dreams and been warned about beginning to course through Holy Terra. His Power Claw splayed, the Emperor's gaze was followed by golden strands beginning to form a complex geometrical pattern across Solemnace. The claws closed and the light glowed and the planet splintered in space as though a terrible sieve had torn it.

Before the Emperor all knelt, save the Warmaster, who gazed at the destruction with a sense of déjà vu, before kneeling in turn. The Emperor gazed with dispassionate serenity. With the three Grey Knight Primarchs and his lost ones, he had six, now. Soon, Russ and Corax would return, and then finally the Lion would awaken.

An army rebuilt in loyalty to the Master of Mankind to rival that of his treasonous son. And the final battle for the Eye of Terror. Either the Eye would be destroyed or the visions he'd seen of ascending to become a God of Law, a force of fearsome power whose destructive nature remade Terra into a hellish paradise would ensue. It troubled the Emperor that the concept of an apotheosis that would remake Terra no longer bothered him.

 **Armageddon:  
**

Given the first honors of landing, Merihem understood instinctively, was no honor at all. Just more of his brothers trying to dispose of him and leave him for weakness. Bah. Iron was the true strength of existence. Iron, not merely within but without as well. His metallic teeth smiled as he saw his battle-brother, Oriax, rather calmer than he was.

 **Worry not, brother**. The flowing metallic sound of Merihem's voice gave shudders even to the rest of the Chaos band. **I shall leave a few for you to scrounge.**

Oriax growled.

 **There will be blood aplenty here.**

Merihem simply laughed as the ship they were in crashed into the surface, raising a tremendous column of smoke and ash.

The Iron Warriors on Armageddon, under command of the venerable Dantioch the Elder, approached with hesitation. If this was a true ship of the IV Legion it had been through very strange things. As they saw with a sudden horror drop-packs and a rain of Space Marines ensuing, the ship's door burst open.

Two monsters left, one to the right more of a thing of strange metal that gazed at them with hunger, forming its hand in a horrifyingly boneless fashion into chainsword-fingers, the one to the left a towering colossus at three meters in height and two meters across. This one formed its arms into meltaguns, and its strangely metallic melting slopping voice said: 

**Iron Within, Iron Without.**

The Meltaguns opened fire without warning as the rest of the troops under the command of Warsmith Andraaz and Over-Captain Honsou suddenly made landfall…..


	9. Till Heaven Crack

**The Battlefields of Armageddon:**

Merihem and Oriax looked at each other as they confronted the Imperial Forces, their fellow Astartes, on Armageddon. Here they faced two companies of Ultramarines, a leftover company of Grey Knights, and the Iron Warriors garrison in charge of pacifying the place after the apocalyptic clash between the God-Emperor and Primarch Angron. While Oriax, as an Obliterator, embodied the dangerous fusion of technology and Chaos, Merihem waded through entire armies with a merry abuse of destructive force.

Warsmith Dantioch had been horrified when two Ultramarines had tried to rush him jointly and he'd instead extended what looked like Eldar wire-traps, encircling them, and then shattering them as blood and gore dripped from their torn apart armor. He had been still more horrified at the ease with which Merihem ripped his way through the Imperial Guard. These creatures had been once part of the Warmaster's own, and now they were transformed into creatures neither pure Astartes nor of the Warp, but a horrifying blend of both.

And they were but two of an entire Grand Company of Iron Warriors, attacking with Chaos Engines shaped in the form of monstrous ravening Wolves, and the monstrous and malformed _Dies Irae,_ the most terrifying of all the Titans that had fallen into the hands of the Ruinous Powers. Its war horn sounded with an antediluvian foghorn's bellow, a sound to chill even the heart of the Astartes listening, let alone the Imperial Guard. Armageddon had bled grievously, and still more grievously bled it now. The whole of the Grand Battalion of the Lost Ones was being deployed, a cunning thrust from the demented….thing…that had been Rogal Dorn. Repaying the Iron Warriors Primarch, the accursed Warmaster in the lineage of Horus and Guilliman for their long rivalry by turning his own paranoid foe's paranoia against him. Or so he proposed.

 **The Imperial Palace:**

Not since Ullanor, before the Heresy, had there been such a gathering in splendor of the sons of the Emperor. The grim Warmaster, Lord of Iron, architect of glorious buildings and the terrible grinding firepower that made up the splendor and terror of the Imperium. The three new Psyker Primarchs, who'd managed to further enclose the hole in the Webway that had threatened to unleash Daemons into Terra after others of their number had fallen and burst open in the attempt, a long and terrible forgotten and hidden conflict during the Long War that none would know of in full beyond the Emperor and the Warmaster. Each of them more than a match for the Magnus the Red before the Heresy, fully informed of the horrors of the Warp, adopting the philosophy of Jagatai Khan to work within the Warp aware of its horrors, Masters of the Grey Knights.

The Returned Ones, Jagatai Khan, silent and stoic but restored to renewed vigor and strength. Once living on the fringes of the Imperium, discontent at being slighted and not willing to take more direct steps to address it, now one of the honored and revered ones whose presence was one of veneration and reverence.

And great Vulkan, a towering mountain of dusky skin with glowing red eyes. The torments that Vulkan and Jagatai had endured were healing here, with their father and their brother. Over time they had learned of Perturabo's grand war as the third Warmaster, after Roboute the Fallen and Horus the Arch-Heresiarch. It had truly been a long and sordid war, waged with pitiless nature against the most sinister of foes, including the terrible Daemon-Primarchs.

This gathering was in itself a prelude to the plan of one of the first steps in the Final War. Thus was it that each of the Sons, the New Primarchs, the Returned Ones, and the Warmaster, resting his forearms on Forgebreaker, listened to the Master of Mankind's great plan:

"As you have learned over ten thousand years the Warp Storm that men call the Maelstrom has finally been destabilized by the careful use of the Grey Knights and targeted use of Pariahs. The closure of the Maelstrom and the total destruction of Huron Blackheart will be one of the greatest blows struck at the Ruinous Powers since the attempt to make the Webway."

The brothers listened in fascination to the glowing God whose ever-shifting features gazed at all of them in a more distinctive fashion, golden light dancing over the clawed gauntlets on his fingers like Will o the Wisps. The Master of Mankind smiled with a cryptic smile as he said, "It is with this that we will begin to restore order to the Galaxy, and banish the foulness of the Warp back into inability to access material space. A shot across its bow."

 **Armageddon:**

The slaughter on the planet had reached a sufficient crescendo for the Iron Warriors Dark Chapter to initiate the next stage of its plan, to invoke the first stages of the End of Time. As Andrazz dueled with Dantioch, Thunder Hammer smashing against shield in a terrifying duel of powerful figures in Terminator armor, the dark incantation continued its work. A fell and terrifying light followed and from it began to emerge the ruined and twisted thing that had once been the Imperial Fist.

Like the twisted image of Gods of Old Earth, he emerged, a towering monster with eight arms, four limbs extending from his trunk and breaking into two others, each with the massive build of what had once been a Primarch. Three were his faces, eyes transformed into yellow and glowing traces of Warp flame, gnashing and growling. Each of his hands held swords that were made of the pure material of the Warp, hissing and tearing green streaks into reality, one of his faces speaking with a booming voice:

 **I am Hell and ruin made manifest!**

The other two speaking litanies of blasphemy and insults upon the majesty of the Master of Mankind. As the monster strode forward, his swords and monstrously deformed figure, swollen to the same height as Magnus the Red began to carve a red ruin on Armageddon, seeking to make it a pyre sufficient to draw in the next phase of their plan.

After ten thousand years of meditation, it would be time for Lorgar Aurelian, Bearer of the Word, he who was first in initiating the Long War, to become the proper commander of all the Fallen Primarchs.

 **The Eye of Terror, Fabius Bile's Laboratory:**

The clone of the Emperor calmly stepped forward, gazing clearly at Fabius Bile. Like the Master of Mankind the clone glowed with a terrible aura of psychic Gold that burned into Fabius's warp-infested body, the power of a God contained in human flesh. Those eyes, Fabius could not in truth focus upon them. He had manipulated the flesh of Primarchs with ease, yet as the other tanks burst open, two more direct copies of the Master of Mankind stepped out.

Overwhelmed with psychic gold Fabius fell to his knees screaming, only for the first of the clones to tell him:

+Face up.+

He looked into the eyes of not one but four angry Gods, a number he had chosen to make each a pure embodiment of the Dark Gods. That knowledge made the cloned Gods angrier and in a burst of psi-flame Fabius screamed and wailed, his filthy soul scoured from existence has had been Horus and Angron before him. The four Gods looked at each other.

++Brothers, We go out of the Cygnus Anomaly. We go to Terra. We see what the One Whom we have copied makes of Us.++

With that the Gods in question strode out calmly, finding to their own amusement that for all his addiction to the Ruinous Powers and the corruption of the Eye that Fabius's latest ship was a captive one of the former Black Ships of the Heresy era, no less. Intact and shielded against the Warp with a mighty Geller Field.

One sat in the command throne and others at the bridges and with their will alone the ship began to move into the Warp. A direct line was set to Terra. And woe to any entities of the Warp that decided to test the great raw power of the Master of Mankind itself, and the results of the scheming of the burning corpse in the laboratory, a wretched and a pitiful life that had ended.

The Maelstrom:

Huron Blackheart gazed in shock and fear at the knowledge of what was on its way. The Malcador, the Emperor's own flagship, meaning a direct confrontation with the Master of Mankind. The Master of Mankind had spent most of his energy against the Eye of Terror and Abaddon, for which Blackheart had been deeply grateful. The Maelstrom was deeply unstable now, shaking rifts within its territory depleting his forces by unprepared transitions to realspace.

That damned Warmaster and his Iron Warriors were beating him with combinations of the Imperial Truth, a heresy of hope and an end to warfare, and simple quantities of firepower. The Warmaster alone had easily dismantled entire armies of fallen Astartes and massacred still larger forces of the Lost and the Damned. Now the Warmaster was coming with the Khan and the entire gathered force of the White Scars since the abolition of the Legions, gathered as one to wage war under their Primarch for the first time since his disappearance, still larger than the force that had gone to Solemnace.

Great Vulkan was coming too, at the head of his armies of Salamanders. The return of this Primarch, the one who wouldn't die, was even more disconcerting as with his return the Salamanders would return to being one of the most deadly and efficient forces of the Astartes, hardened by Unity, by the Heresy, the Long War, and now a ferocious blade in the hand of their Primarch.

A Legion's worth of the Grey Knights, under their three Primarchs, all of them uncorruptible Psykers of the power of Magnus the Red, the Grey Knights worth as much as anything except the Pariah-infused Iron Warriors themselves. Perturabo had deliberately bred this trait into the Iron Warriors gene seed with the approval of the Master of Mankind, enabling his Iron Warriors to become a kind of antithesis to the Grey Knights. It was a modification that its own Tridents had undergone, and one of the most deadly aspects of facing this.

These armies were assembling on Terra, and if the statements of the Dark Gods were correct, he must move with an iron fist. Because this was a do or die moment. For the Maelstrom and the Ruinous Powers, or its collapse and his soul and all those like him sent screaming into the Warp to be the plaything of Daemons.

The Imperial Palace:

The massive figure who'd snuck around into the Palace found it deeply amusing in one way just how easy it was for him to have infiltrated this place. To be fair he'd served the Master of Mankind in an earlier life long enough to guess many of his secrets, and what ones he hadn't he, as a relic of a still more ancient age was able to overpower with a raw and brutal ease. He'd seen the return of the Emperor's sons, and he wanted, now, after ten thousand years of furtively hiding and honing his reflexes against attempts by followers of the Ruinous Powers to strike into Terra, defeating forces of all four of the Ruinous Powers over that time, was ready to meet his maker again. To pledge his service, and that of his surviving seven to the Master of Mankind.

It was the end of time, after all, and simple survival and perhaps simple brute expediency would mean that there would be a reunion.

Yes, he'd found it deeply amusing until he stood next to the towering figure in golden armor whose dancing face, at times a stern and cruel warlord, the figure he was most familiar with in unity, at times a benevolent God whose face was painful for Primarchs to gaze upon and blinded Psykers temporarily, at times a weeping elder full of sorrow and remorse.

"Arik."

Arik Taranis smiled and hammered his fist against the plate of his specially modified handmade Power armor.

"Emperor."


	10. Signs and Wonders in Those Days

THE IMPERIAL PALACE:

"You survived, then."

It was not a question. Arik Taranis nodded. "I did. During the time when your son, the first Warmaster raised an insurrection I and my battle-brother slew Astartes and took their gene-seed and modified them. The three of us are the last of your Thunder Warriors and we have dwelled on Terra ever since, fighting at times secretly against individual infiltrators from the Long War."

The Emperor's stern face was impassive though as always His features were plastic, dancing between faces and expressions in that hypnotic fashion Taranis had remembered from Unity. He dropped to his knees.

"We served you once, in Unity. I know why you culled us, Lord and Master of Mankind. We did not fit into a world of peace, as you aspired to make. But in a world of the Long War, and in the Final clash at the end of time, perhaps the three of us can tender our aid and bring to the stars the power that united Terra. One last time."

The Emperor stared for a moment and then the dancing multi-faced God in armor nodded.

As he took Taranis's hand and raised him to his feet Perturabo blinked as for a moment he saw a vision-

Tall golden and blue figures in what seemed neither flesh nor metal but a mixture of both wielding strange bolter-like crossbows slamming into a mass of howling Chaotic beings, led by an impossible and wondrous figure.

They shouted: "For Sigmar! Heldenhammer!"

They slammed into the flank of the forces of Chaos who hissed and howled and yet pressed between not one but two Gods of Order, Sigmar and the Master of Mankind their armies were shattered and the Maelstrom closed.

He shook his head and the moment passed. Only the Primarchs of the Grey Knights and the Emperor gave him a look, the Emperor raising an eyebrow skeptically for a moment but letting it pass in silence.

"My Lord," the Emperor turned to a Sister of Silence.

"Yes?"

"There is a ship that just appeared out of the Warp overhead."

Everyone looked up. "It bears the markers of Fabius Bile."

He said "It is not Bile's work."

He then turned to his sons.

"My sons, I ask that all of you save Taranis and the Warmaster leave. What is to happen here, for a few minutes, must be left entirely within these hands. If the judgment should go one way, you shall have your answers in less than an hour."

Hesitantly, the Primarchs stepped out of the room, all of them save Warmaster Perturabo who instinctively reached for his hammer. The Emperor raised his power claw to gesture not to do so and Perturabo nodded, if confused.

The Emperor waited and then a sudden boom and a flash of electric light followed as four figures landed and stood before him. They were clad in artificier armor, if unadorned. Indeed it seemed like elements of the Ruinous Powers had been enscribed there but to the Emperor's inner amusement the Power within these four had shattered.

Perturabo and Taranis both stiffened and then in spite of the warnings did begin to reach for their weapons until again the Emperor gestured not to do it.

Four psychic voices spoke in unity at once, the power sufficient to drive the Warmaster and the Thunder Warrior to their knees:

++We have come to submit to your judgment, Master of Mankind.++

The Emperor's voice responded:

+You are clones of me, a technology that was and is forbidden in the Imperium. Clones made in the Eye of Terror by a fallen heretic.+

Their eyes remained on the ground.

+But you were not corrupted by the Eye. I can see this.+

The Emperor stood taller, in a way, than he had before.

+It is the time of the Final War between Chaos and the Imperium. We have fought for ten thousand years and it is time to return to an Age of Legends, to blaze and forge the stars anew and shatter the heavens with the songs of steel.+

Then the dancing faces for a rare point in time shared the same emotions, a strange calm and yet predatory smile with eyebrows coming closer together in a fashion like a gilded and terrifying eagle.

+But it is fitting that at the End of All Things that a God should have Four who proceed him.+

With a cryptic smile the Emperor turned and to the first of the Four Clones said:

+Come+

And he stood up and went to the Emperor, who handed to him a laurel and a bow.

+You shall ride forth conquering and to conquer.+

With a sudden assertion of the power granted to Him by a hundred centuries of Worship, the clone's armor shifted to a brilliant, almost eye-searing white and he nodded, standing with the bow as he awaited the judgments of the other three.

To the second of the clones the God-Emperor said +Come+

And he stood and he was given a sword.

+You shall take peace from the Stars and the Traitors shall turn and slay one another in Your Presence.+ He nodded, taking the sword which seemed to hiss through the air with a palpable, tangible malice and glee.

An assertion of Divine Will and the armor turned red.

To the third of the clones the God-Emperor said: +Come+

And he stood up, his armor shifting to a dappled kind that made him paradoxically seem a God in height and yet gaunt.

With words that the God-Emperor and His clones understood but none else did save, perhaps, one who had he still been living would have found it deeply amusing in a way none else would:

+A quart of wheat for a denarius, a quart of barley for a denarius. Do not harm the oil and the wine+, and the third was given a scale which glowed with psychic might, seeming to emit rays of power.

To the Fourth He gestured and said +Come+.

And then with a subtle hint Taranis followed him:

+You are Death, and Hell shall ride with you.+

Handing to him a great scythe reminiscent of the weapon of Mortarion, He said:

+To You is given power over a quarter of all who need judgment. They shall be slain with fire and sword and famine and the wild beasts that go forth and crawl upon the Earth.+

The Emperor then turned to Perturabo and spoke with that seemingly cryptic smile:

+And the God spoke to Him who strode upon the Clouds across worlds: Swing your Hammer and strike the vines, sweep the grapes of Heresy from the Stars. Heresy has shed the blood of saints and prophets and it shall be given blood to drink as is its due.+

Another vision, and Perturabo saw himself a colossus standing amidst the eternal and silvery stars raising Worldbreaker and then with a sudden swing psychic screams followed and millions fell headlong across some worlds, for a total of one billion heretics, the first in a psychic blow not by the power of Chaos, but by the power of Order itself.

The Emperor smiled and then his eyes glowed and one hundred centuries of Worship blazed forth in a golden field of psychic energy invoked by the sudden massacre and death-scream of the Chaos-worshipers across the Imperium. A golden Storm of Order that would seal off the Eye of Terror and the Chaos-bands there, in time sufficient for the Emperor to unleash the first strike of the Final War, a blow that would devastate the power of Chaos and send the suitable message that in the End of All Things all would be fixed.

The God-Emperor smiled as Perturabo gazed blankly in horrified fascination.

"Well done, my good and faithful servant."

With this the Emperor placed a golden-armored hand on the shoulder of the Warmaster.

Then He gestured and the doors opened and His sons strode in.

"These are my Four Horsemen," He gestured to each of the Clones.

"Conquest, War, Famine, and Death. Each suitable as a counter-symbol to the Gods of the Warp, Conquest against the Skull Throne, Famine against Pestilence, War against Love," and he turned to Death with a cryptic smile, "and Death against Hope."

The immense claw on his right hand splayed outward as He said, "gather the Legions you command."

To the Grey Knight Psykers He said "Call to you all of the Grey Knights. Let them see their Primarchs make war. We go now to the Maelstrom. And in our great fist, it shall close."

The Emperor then smiled again with that disconcerting display of emotion from one once always known for stoicism.

"To remind my people of my fealty to them, raise my first flagship. As in the end, so in the beginning it shall be in the Imperator Somnium that the Master of Mankind leads Mankind in the Rhana Dandra, the End of all Things!"

A cheer echoed with a bellowing howl from some and cheers of bloodlust and eager for war in others. Only in the mutual unease of the gazes of Vulkan and Perturabo was there disconcertment at the nature of events, and in Vulkan's case the moment passed and he began to cheer with the same lust for blood and death that others brought.

THE EYE OF TERROR:

Abaddon the Despoiler led a ship to test the sudden crackling golden field that had ringed the Eye of Terror. The Gods were startled by the sudden manifestation of the purer Psychic fields within the Warp, and by the sudden and brutal demonstration of the Power within the Gilded Lord on Terra.

Too, they were disconcerted not just by the audacity of Bile in cloning a God not once but Four times, displeased at the symbol, but by the awareness of what the Emperor was planning to unleash. The Gods ordered their loyalists to strike, and then as they slammed into the golden shield and explosions of thunderous Psychic Force consumed ships and entire crews of Astartes in shrieking pain, a first horde emerged in strange form.

Gigantic verminous rat-like things with great ram's horns on their heads, shrieking "For the Glory of the Horned One" though in the silence of space their sounds emerged more from the power of the Warp than any kind of vocal force. The monstrous enhanced form and power of the Skaven, first deployed against the Storm of the Emperor's Vengeance collided into it and left black smears and smoke in space in soundless shrieks and in the Warp-torn howls of the damned.

Five score and seven score the forces of Chaos smote the shield. Five score and sevenscore they failed and were banished within the depths of the Immaterium and left with naught but their names.


	11. To Absent Friends

**EN ROUTE TO THE MAELSTROM:**

It was a standard rule of Perturabo to never look to his past, but looking to his brothers and his Father in direct presence or via Hololiths was a moment of unprecedented power sufficient to break that rule. In particular looking at the determination of the Warhawk and the Lord of Drakes gave him an aching emotional pain he was unfamiliar with, save the grief of fighting against Magnus the Red and Horus in days gone by. Memories of a brother fallen to madness, before his fall. In his last days as Warmaster.

In this spirit, he thought to the last time that he'd fought by the Lord of Drakes and the Avenging Son. It was the War of the Beast, when the Beast had raised Prime-Orks to fight Primarchs, the last war that multiple of the Emperor's Sons had fought together, before Fulgrim had sent Guilliman to destruction and Sanguinius, the last of the Lost Ones, had vanished with the promise to return at the End of Days.

 _ **ARDAMANTUA, M32:**_

 _The Lord of Iron looked upon the Avenging Son with a skeptical eye._

" _It must be a serious crisis for the Warmaster to call my Legion."_

 _Roboute nodded, face less robotic than usual. Well, not that he'd been especially emotionless since Horus had fallen on the_ Vengeful Spirit _and the Great Scouring. He was like the old Roboute Guilliman, the Rebuilder of the Five Hundred Worlds._

" _It's Greenskins, my brother. They've changed. Grown."_

 _Even then the Lord of Iron had had premonitions that this, the greatest challenge of Guilliman's time as Warmaster might be his last. It was in the down-cast gaze of his brother, the sigh of all too human weakness and exhaustion so bizarre in the Avenging Son._

" _They speak Gothic now, my brother."_

 _Perturabo straightened, his Trident likewise. The Circle of Iron remained immobile around him._

" _Gothic? From Greenskins?"_

 _Roboute nodded. That weary grimace and that all too human sigh again._

" _And they have tactics. I have activated the Calth Protocol to muster my Legion again, Brother. They have_ tactics."

 _Roboute looked haunted._

" _It is a grave crisis that faces us, my brother. One I do not know how the Imperium shall recover from."_

 _Perturabo released a breath that had held for some time._

" _Roboute," he sighed "Warmaster," and sighed again._

" _Do you know if_ He _will come to the battlefield? I have not seen him in a thousand years."_

 _The Avenging Son gave a pained smile._

" _I don't know, brother. He's trusted us and the Great Angel the Scouring and keeping our traitorous brothers and Ezekyle's new Legion contained. The Wolf King is gone, the Warhawk vanished into the Webway. Corax fled into the Eye, Vulkan…."_

 _He sighed. "He may be found, perhaps, in the course of this war but he said that he would return at the Last War so I doubt that. Once there were twenty of us, then eighteen."_

 _He placed a hand on Perturabo's shoulder and the Lord of Iron stiffened, not used to affection._

" _Now there are three of us. You, Lord of Iron, me, and the Great Angel."_

 _He looked downcast again._

" _I had the dream again, Brother."_

 _Perturabo looked at him._

" _Fulgrim."_

 _His jaw tightened and he glared, again surprisingly human for someone Perturabo used to see as an iron fisted mental warrior._

" _I faced the Phoenician in that monstrous form of his that ravaged Terra and while I banished him and nearly destroyed him, he cut my throat and I a museum piece for others to gaze upon as a red haze forms around me."_

 _Perturabo remained stoic even as Roboute finished:_

" _This may be our last war together, brother."_

 _He looked at him._

" _You may end up Warmaster and the last of His sons in the field, for as long as the fates decree it."_

 _Perturabo gave him a wry grin._

" _They haven't claimed me yet, brother. They won't start now."_

 _As he gestured to the arrival of his Legion's ships, the Avenging Son and the Lord of Iron stepped into the Teleportation Chambers together with their bodyguards._

" _We go to the engine room of this damned thing and we cripple it. Our Legions will fall upon it from the outside. They have tactics."_

 _Again that grimace._

 _Then a small wry smile._

" _But against two sons of the Emperor, what will that avail them?"_

 _They vanished in that flash and then they appeared in the Battle Moon, the Trident communicating with their Grand Battalions, co-ordinating precision orbital strikes in the finest and remorseless style of the Iron Warriors, even as the Circle of Iron and the Praetorians maneuvered behind the Emperor's sons._

 _The Avenging Son's Power Fists crackled into life and the Lord of Iron removed Worldbreaker from his shoulder, the two sons of the Emperor surging into the battlefield, demigods of war facing the monstrous new Orks. Perturabo was surprised that facing two such targets these Orks proved to not only understand fire and maneuver but even to try to set ambushes._

 _Against his speed with Worldbreaker and the Circle of Iron and Guilliman's efficient baiting of his own traps it availed them better than expected. Both of their armors were chipped, which had never happened before, and the battles with the individual Orks lasted longer. As the Lord of Iron shielded the Avenging Son by slamming his hammer through the leg of one of the Orks, bringing it down with a triumphant shout, his bolters tore open the face of another._

 _It was when they finally reached the engines, preparing to disable it that they met the greatest surprise. The Warboss of this Moon was waiting for them clad in proper armor, and spoke in accented but understandable Gothic._

" _I will take your surrender now."_

 _It was a massive beast, not to the size of Urlakk Urg but enough to give him a passable bodyguard. The creature moved to them. "I serve the WAAGH Beast. I am slaughter!" With this he hurled himself at the Sons of the Emperor, who maneuvered themselves with full speed and strength in a battle that lasted hours and drew in the Iron Circle. Roboute bled from puncture wounds to the stomach, Perturabo had a shattered pauldron and a bleeding wound in his leg, and both visibly panted with the exhaustion when the haze and mandate of combat had passed and the Ork lay beneath them, alive and with legs broken._

 _It had been seamless and a battle neither of them, even with eidetic memory would fully recall, merely the swingings and boomings of the Thunder Hammer against the Ork's armor and the monstrous creature's enduring punches and stabbings from the power fists repeatedly until the armor finally gave way, having to dodge the Ork's strikes, and that it had been a lucky pair of shots by Perturabo that tore into the beast's eyes and blinded the monster, at which point it reverted to the more animalistic kind of Ork they were familiar with from the Heresy and Crusade eras._

 _Perturabo looked at Guilliman. Since when had a mere Ork Warboss been able to give the Sons of the Emperor a real fight?_

 **THE MAELSTROM:**

Kor Phaeron was surprised to see the nature of the entity that stood before him. It was a monstrously oversized rat with more than a resemblance to a mockery of the human form. Great ram's horns hung from its side and the creature looked at him with a keenness that made him visibly uneasy.

"What in the name of the Four are you?"

 _ **I am-am Grey Seer Thanquol, servant of the Horned One.**_

"I know not which God that is."

 _ **The Horned One is-is the greatest of all-all the Gods. We are-are the servants of Him, Lords of Decay.**_

"We?"

Another monstrous rat-thing strode out, clad in spectral raiments like that of a monstrous skeleton of its own kind. The Verminlord pointed to his fellow.

 _ **Dead-Lord Verrteek, Lord-Lord of Clan Mors. Emperor-Manthing comes to you now-now. We rip-rip Man-Meat for you. Show you power of Horned One. Suggest-suggest you accept-accept, man-thing.**_

Kor Phaeron snarled.

"I am a Dark Apostle of Lord Aurelian, beast. You have no power to give orders to me."

Then the Grey Seer slammed its staff into the ground, a burst of raw Warp Force knocking Kor Phaeron back.

 _ **That-that is where-where you are wrong-wrong.**_

The Grey Seer strode toward him, green balefires lit in its eyes…..


	12. Book II: The War Begins

**Book II: War for the Maelstrom**

It is the 41st Millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the God-Emperor of Mankind has ruled the embattled Imperium from the Imperial Palace on Terra. He is the Master of Mankind by the will of the Gods, the conqueror of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. His armies are led by his Warmaster, Grim Perturabo of the Iron Warriors, first among equals in a revived Age of Legends.

He is the Golden Lord of Terra, in whose name billions die every day with a song on their lips. In his secretiveness the Emperor prepares new plans to repair the ravages of the Horus Heresy, manipulating the timeless aspects of the Warp to his aims. By his will the great Astronomican that guides humanity through the stars burns, and when the Emperor and his Warmaster direct their armies personally, the armies are unstoppable.

Greatest of all his soldiers is Warmaster Perturabo, whose Iron Warriors are the greatest among the Adeptes Astartes, rivaled only by the mighty Warlock-Warriors of the Grey Knights. Among their allies are the ever-vigilant Inquisition, the fanatical Adeptes Sororitas, and the Imperial Guard to name only a few. But all their strength is barely sufficient to hold against the ever-present threat of Chaos, of daemons and of mutants corrupted by the foul powers of the dark gods.

To live in this time is to live in the time of ending, in the most cruel and barbarous terror imaginable, yet it is a time of mighty heroes, of bold deeds, and great courage. And as the Wolf-time draws ever nearer, the Imperium shall need its heroes as it has never needed them before. Science, reason, and technology, the greatest achievements of the human race, these have been forgotten in the Long War. Forget compassion and understanding, for there is only war in the grim dark future, but an eternity of slaughter and death and the thirst of laughing Gods.

 **THE IMPERIAL FLEET, STARSHIP** _ **LORD OF OLYMPIA**_

Andronikos was one of the elite among the Thoratikai. The most famous, or infamous, of the Imperial Guard outside the bare-chested Catchacans, they were armored akin to the mighty Adeptes Astartes they had pledged lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to. Behind the frontiers of its massive armies, the Emperor had allowed the Warmaster to do one of the greatest gambles of them all: building a future of freedom, of peace, of love, defying Old Night and the terrors of the Warp by sending into it thoughts that he hoped could if not poison the Dark Gods weaken them on their own soil, so to speak.

Hence the schizoid nature of the Imperium, the two-faced aspect. On the one hand the iron fist of the dreadful Inquisition and the half-mythical Grey Knights, the terrifying Adeptes Astartes and the iron-fisted corpse-grinding approach of the Warmaster. The face that burned continents and left worlds blackened rubble, that devoured oceans. That left the broken bodies of Astartes, Custodes, and countless humans in the martyrdom-obsessed theocracy the Imperium had become since the Battle of Terra and the Great Scouring across countless worlds and in endless and terrifying nightmarish clashes showed the dreadful might of the Imperium had but grown since the time of the Heresy.

Then there was that other face. Worlds of buildings of astonishing beauty, buildings that by their nature challenged the stark and austere barracks-like buildings of the sub-empire of Ultramar and its rulers, and the wilder and more morbid realms such as Nocturne and Fenris and Medusa, where the sons of the Lost Ones retained Death Worlds. Realms that encouraged hope, desires for peace instead of a grim darkness where there was only war. Realms freed as much as could be of plague and all manner of misery, realms where the schizoid face took two forms. In worlds purely loyal to the Emperor the zealous enforcement of the Imperial Creed existed, and there were shrine-worlds to all the Primarchs, even Perturabo himself in a grim irony. And the worlds of the (called purely internally amongst itself) Empire of Iron and even parts of Ultramar that pledged loyalty not to Roboute Guilliman's vision but Perturabo's. A world that in a revised variant of the Imperial Truth akin to the doctrines of the Interex worshiped no Gods, but warded against Chaos, worlds where not for lack of trying the Warp failed to break into.

These were strange and alien influences, and they had their moments of tension, including the darkness of the Age of Apostasy, where the Creed had fallen into corrupt handling and the Emperor, in pursuit of an undisclosed force was distracted for a time. A time of near-outbreak of another civil war only settled when the Warmaster turned the guns of the Iron Blood on the fortress of the self-proclaimed Master of Soldiers and this, combined with the landing of a large force of the Ten Thousand created the irony of the transformation of his 'Brides of the Emperor' into the Adeptes Sororitas.

Andronikos looked over to the nearby set of them on the ship. Women in armor, terrifying and austere in their own right. Soldier-fanatics of a God-Emperor who had no compunctions about unleashing these more dreadful successors of the Sisters of Silence due to their abilities to work strange miracles. The windows were shuttered and the Geller fields were active but he didn't need them to envision the vast fleets of the Lord of Iron around them.

The Iron Warriors were hard masters and cruel ones, perfectly content even with the Warmaster's grand dreams to put hapless mortals in positions to die to score tactical engagements or strategic ones. Indeed it was the strangest dichotomy of them all. The same mind who built the golden ratio into all things, a craftsman of proportions to rival the mythical Ferrus Manus and Vulkan, a cold and calculating and mercurial figure who waged war as a romance-less mathematics. The Iron Warriors were brutal and methodical planners who drowned enemies in blood and fire of overwhelming proportions. They also waged war with a savagery and frenzy that rivaled the rumored False Angels in the Maelstrom and the Eye of Terror, savagery that left some wondering what the Iron Warriors might have been had Perturabo, not Dorn, joined the Primarchs who'd reaved the Galaxy in the madness of the warlord Horus the Damned.

They were masters who'd raised the sons of Olympia in their image, men esteemed as craftsmen in peace, building glorious buildings of opulent and baroque fashions, going from bunkers to some of the most astonishing sights in the long and sordid history of the Galaxy. And men who casually ordered the PDF to walk over minefields to clear them, who had no hesitation to call artillery on their own positions to clear them. Men to whom war was no romantic lark, no clashing bell-clang of modernized knights waging war against daemons and dragons across the sure and silvery stars, but men to whom war was logistics, the overwhelming sound and roar of the guns and the sheets of flames and smoke from them. The animalistic growl of heavy bolters and the sound of Volkites, the firearms the Iron Warriors used to replace Lasguns. A precise and beautiful, after its fashion, blend of iron logic and raw and terrifying violence that left even the most calloused among the dreaded Sons of Sanguinius at times broken on their knees in terror, to say nothing of what it could do to the rank and file soldiers of the Imperial Guard.

Perturabo courted none of the glory-hounding his brothers had done, the loyal and the Fallen alike. But while he courted none, his Astartes and his Legion were given their due in Olympia and its murals and awe-inspiring monuments, not cyclopean in the fashion of Peeter Egon Momus but beauty to rival that of Ancient Hellas and Sindh. And the Imperial Guard was given its own monuments in conquered worlds, and in its recruiting grounds, monuments built by the Warsmiths of the Iron Warriors, at either the personal direction of the Warmaster himself or by his Triarchs. And these same men could be casually on the orders of the Warmaster or the Warsmiths sent to die for simple reasons of that beautiful mathematics, which was a lot less beautiful when the firepower mangled their bodies and the xenos or the filthy things of the Warp got their claws on them, of course.

It was with thoughts like this brooding in his mind that Andronikos, along with countless others headed to the great confrontation in the Maelstrom. Here was Huron Blackheart, one of the greatest renegades among the Astartes since Horus the Damned. His vast and monstrous armies of loyalists and Daemons. And here, too, was the notorious Kor Phaeron, one of the two leaders of the False Angels Legion known as the Word Bearers. Two great champions of the darkness raised against the Light.

Thinking, too, about the sheer might of the Imperator Somnium, the greatest of the Emperor's craft, and the deployment of no less than six Primarchs, and the strange and shadowy figures known as the Four Horsemen. He smiled. What possible chance did the Hordes of Chaos have?

 **THE MORIENDI, FLAGSHIP OF HORSEMAN DEATH:**

The Master of Mankind had given each of His Four Horsemen titles and specialized pre-prepared suits of Artificier Armor wrought in Auramite. Each of the Horsemen in turn had channeled the psychic power of the Master of Mankind as He had been in the era of the Heresy into their roles. For the one known as Death on his white throne styled in the shape of a leering human skull, this meant that the psychic corona around his head that blinded the lesser around Him was coupled with an ability to absorb light into Himself.

Holding the vast scythe _Harvester,_ he looked. Had the light-absorption effect around Him been parted for a moment his face would have danced akin to the Master of Mankind's himself. Instead, with the dark hood and cloak behind the carefully wrought black armor, He was a God, yes. A dreadful and nightmarish figure of Death itself made manifest, a monster in the image of Mortarion as he might have been absent the machination of the Warp.

He leaned forward. As the Imperial fleet paused within the Maelstrom, he spoke with a thunderclap of Psychic power.

 _ **++Opportunity has awakened itself. Lower the Void shields.++**_ Worshipful crewmen and servitors began to comply…

 **THE MAELSTROM:**

Raised to his feet by one of the Unburdened who served him, Kor Phaeron growled and then lunged forward at the monstrous beast Verrteek. Again the creature smashed down its staff and this time instead of falling he knelt, the monstrous rodent chittering like the overgrown horned rat-man it was.

 _ **New-new power in the Warp-Warp we are-are, yes.**_

The cunning glowing green eyes of the monster seemed to leer somehow as it leaned forward, its breath making the elderly man gag within his armor. He wished he'd had his damned helmet.

 _ **Emperor-thing comes-comes on ships to burn-burn Maelstrom. Horned One desires first blow be struck-struck by us-us.**_

The ratman leered.

 _ **Time-time now-now to see-see might of superior Skaven race!**_

The staff collided again and Kor Phaeron and the Unburdened with him screamed along with the lesser Skaven disappearing in a flash.

THE MORIENDI:

The locus for teleportation appeared and then with the odor of timeless decay and malice that attended the greater manifestations of the Warp, the shocked Kor Phaeron and his servants found themselves on a new ship. He placed an armored gauntlet over his eyes as the lesser Skaven and the Unburdened hissed in pain. There was a white throne and He who sat upon it, a figure of dreadful darkness amidst light yet emanating a glow that withered as with heat, and pierced as with a deadly cold.

Pride, however, made Kor Phaeron squint and stand erect.

"Kor Phaeron of the Word Bearers, one of the twin Dark Apostles who rule them. True father to Lorgar Aurelian. Now, False Emperor, you know the name of your killer."

Then the figure on the Throne rose to His feet and Kor Phaeron gasped in awe and horror, and the Skaven instinctively cringed, save the Grey-Seer. The figure then intoned in a psychic voice akin to that of the Emperor but darker, tinged in blood and horror:

 _ **++Doom am I become, dealing death to the worlds, engaged in devouring daemonkind++**_

The figure raised his scythe and the figures of Chaos prepared to surge against the Dark Anathema, the better to score a blow at the start of the War…


	13. I am Slaughter

_**War of the Beast: I am Slaughter**_

 _The clash over Ardamantua, unknown to the two Primarchs, the present and future Warmasters of the Imperium was but the beginning of a dreadful conflict that would engulf the Imperium in the greatest clashes of arms before the Time of Ending and since Horus reaved across the Imperium. The monstrous Warboss had presented them with a dark and terrifying challenge, as did the discovery that these new Orcs were abominations capable of using strategy and logic. Tactics._

 _The Greenskins had changed. Evolved. Not merely co-opting rocks or befouling achievements of mankind, now. They harnessed moons, their armies were adept at organization at levels that could not be matched. Chapters, the legacy of Guilliman's doctrine, were overwhelmed because they fought against the expected foe of Ullanor, a WAAGH that charged in simple mass and relied on the sheer weight of its members and the gigantic mass of Orks to replace strategy. Instead they faced calculated use of artillery and Gargant support, air power perfectly co-ordinated, and Orks that were still massive and too brutish to lie down and die with one or two bolter rounds._

 _Against the Iron Warriors and their methodical Iron Cages the new WAAGH Beast found targets it couldn't resist, but the vicious cunning and savagery of the Iron Warriors way of war turned their newfound strength against them, as the Orks expected the Iron Cages to be designed to be captured when they expanded on the principles of the Cavea Ferrum. No peace in the iron cages, only slaughter and red (in this case green) ruin. Against a Legion, in the earliest skirmishes of the war, their strength proved hollow, as Perturabo conducted that first great clash with them in a battle in (to his wry amusement) nowhere else but the Phall system._

 _Site of a dreadful clash of Iron Warriors under Warsmith Dantioch and the Imperial Fist, in the wake of Dorn's betrayal of Isstvan, it was a place of great poignance. And it was a place where stars burned in void-war and the WAAGH faced a genuine defeat in a clash that unfolded across a month's worth of sustained battles. The calculated methods of the Iron Warriors, plans within plans within plans, traps within traps within traps, and the lack of sentimentality proved a means to overwhelm the new Orks, whose attempts to interpret this in terms of what the Iron Warriors deemed the idiotic honor complexes of other Astartes kept failing._

 _Phall burned and Perturabo relished, after his brutal war with Dorn before Dorn had tried to bait his Legion in a trap and Perturabo had stricken his fortress from orbit with the kind of weaponry that burned planets and then the long period of rebuilding and his Legion indulging in craftsmanship, his return to warfare on a grand scale. This was not taking the metal to the stone. This was a fluid war of great armies and great Void-fleets, these in turn ably directed by the now-elderly Barabas Dantioch, who was a virtuoso of space war._

 _The Emperor, however, remained silent and seemingly absent, in the despondence that had befallen him since the death of Horus on the ship. Peturabo remembered the last words that he and Jagatai and Russ had heard from their Father:_

 **++I was supposed to die, to take him out. To be reborn. Everything I worked for is in ashes. What now?++**

 _And so, silence. And so, in his absence, Roboute dared not take the title of Regent, instead deeming himself Warmaster and Executor, and rebuilt the Imperium. He'd presided over the bloody Scouring of the Imperium, and convinced all of his brothers save Perturabo to adopt his chapters. Perturabo had point blank stated he'd remained loyal to the Imperium because Horus sought to divide and overstretch his Legion and that he would not divide his Legion, but that he would disappear, following his side of the Scouring, into rebuilding so as not to provide an overt clash between brothers._

 _Next to the contretemps with everyone save the Warhawk, Roboute was grateful enough that he ignored Perturabo's defiance of his decrees, and so things came to this. The middle of M32, the Imperium starting to reach stability even with Dorn wrecking the world of Toil and Magnus's ravaging of Fenris and other such skirmishes. Even with the emergence of the strange alien Necrons, there was peace. Or there had been peace, at any rate._

 _Now, with the Chromes and these new Orks there was something terrifying. A war of unprecedented nature. Guilliman himself drew his Legion together, calling the Chapter and all its successors in what he termed the Ultimate Sanction as he noticed the greater success Perturabo's Legion was enjoying in the Battle of Phall. He envied his brother the ease of his Gene-Seed and its adaptability as well as his quiet wisdom in extending the Legion beyond Olympia as a means of further increasing its numbers._

 _The war flamed across Imperial space, and with their usual advantages of numbers coupled with genuine tactics and strategy, and with his own depressing realization that many chapters, including the successors to his own Legion were treating his Codex as a sacred text, not as a guide to be abandoned by necessity, the Orks were doing far, far better than they should have been doing._

 _The Battle of Port Sanctus was the first clash of the restored XIII Legion with the Orks, rivaling the Iron Warriors' grand Battle of Phall. Where Perturabo's Legion, due to ignoring the Codex altogether and retaining its pre-Heresy doctrines with some modifications reflecting the new and indeed surprisingly (and to his chagrin a bit envious of this) successful types of technology, was reaping successes while still taking losses, particularly in its associated Imperial Guard forces, the Ultramarine Legion reborn was an uneven force._

 _His best units rivaled or exceeded the Iron Warriors, attaining results equivalent with somewhat-higher casualties due to less technology in the Astartes forces but fewer in the Guard. His average units performed well….workmanlike. Forces that used their troops with the Codex as a guide but able to adapt as needed to circumstances, doing so only at a tactical level, not a strategic one. Indeed, at several points these units had to be rescued by the elites due to blundering into traps that should have been avoided. And then there were those that adhered dogmatically to the Codex regardless of context, and as a result witness their forces encircled and again needing to be rescued._

 _Too, after the breakup of the Legion it was transparently obvious that he'd trained his sons too well. They fought as chapter masters and the task of re-establishing co-ordination on the scale of a Legion outmatched the skills of some of the officers, largely the ones that treated the Codex as dogma and thus committed troops piecemeal. Yet for all the troubles the Ultramarines had enough of the elites and the workmen to deal the Ork Warboss in command of the WAAGHH a severe challenge, and indeed ultimately began to win the battle when the Legion's cohesiveness pulled together in the fires of war._

 _Phall and Port Sanctus were great victories, yet in the wake of two victories won by the Legions, the two Primarchs were to be drawn into a sudden and dangerous surprise: the Beast sent a third attack moon directly over the orbit of Terra itself. In yet another grand crisis facing the two Legions, the two brothers began to send agents to try to find where the Ork Warboss was located._

 _Their Legions were mighty, but even with the sheer size of the assembled XIII and IV Legions, their losses from their first victories were beginning to tell. In conclave in the Imperial Palace, the twin rulers of the Imperium would be rocked by three simultaneous and grand surprises. The first was the appearance, after a lapse of some decades in communication, of the Red Tear in the skies over Terra, with the Angel appearing as glorious as ever and determined to join them for what he also termed with an ominous and wistful sense the last war for many millennia that multiple sons of the Master of Mankind would wage together._

 _Then, the Palace's signals detected strange forces seeking to carve their ways into the teeth of the defenses, these forces manifesting themselves as the savage and shrieking bestial forms of Eldar. The Primarchs and their bodyguards immediately moved to war with the Custodes, whose reappearance was surprising, if predictable._

 _The third surprise, in the wake of the swift and brutal slaughter of the Eldar, who were shocked to see two sons of the Emperor joined by the swift teleportation-arrival of the third and who left only two alive to learn from them just what motivated the inscrutable xenos to such a foolish and misguided assault, was the arrival from the Ork Moon that Perturabo and Roboute were preparing to assault of something none of them had ever imagined._

 _Ork ambassadors. Literal ambassadors._

 _However the final incident was not a surprise to any of them, in the wake of the Ork ambassadors sniffing at the smell of Eldar blood and snorting before saying "We will take your surrender now."_

 _As Roboute prepared a formal denunciation of the demand, doors flung open with a psychic gale and the three Sons of the Emperor knelt before the emotionless figure who strode out, clad in golden armor gilded with the Imperial Aquila. His face danced, the face of a weeping youth, an old man with hollow bagged eyes haunted by the collapse of a dream before it fairly began, a grinning warlord with a mouth of teeth reddened by His own blood. The Ork Ambassadors lurched backwards._

 _The Emperor raised His sword and it flashed into psyflame, His dancing face followed by a dawn-like radiance of fire that seared the Orks' eyes and led to their kneeling as the Emperor cut them down with His sword._

 _The gilded God turned to his offspring, and then cleaned the sword on the corpse of one of the Orks before saying to them:_

 **++Rise my sons.++**

 _The familiar psychic effect of his voice was a soothing caress, and as they all rose, looking him in the eyes, seeing the overlapping faces, he said:_

 **++My time of isolation has ended. The Hour of Trial has begun, a new beginning as Ullanor itself was once.++**

 _That emotionless face and the strange undertone of his psychic voice held an undercurrent of wry irony, a seer sharing in a private joke only he knew, yet was likewise that of a Master of a species ready to reclaim fully His role in His Imperium._

 **++The Golden Throne is fully sealed away, now. I have set in motion a new project that shall not bear fruit for some time, alas.++** _Looking at them, He pointed to the Moon over Terra, and then to Mars, citadel of the Mechanium._

 **++One enemy is overt. The other…..++**

 _The psychic hurricane became the purr of a predator awaiting the signal to begin the hunt._

 **++The other shall mandate cleansing when this war is over.++**

 _He turned to His sons._

 **++I shall ready the** _ **Somnium**_ **, and we shall go to War. These xenos learned from Ullanor, my sons. They seek to emulate us, I believe. To parody the Imperium of the Imperial Creed with an empire of savage Xenos science, led by a figure who seeks to evolve this infection to a point that it will ever after be a threat.++**

 _The face became monstrous when a smile broke across it._

 **++We shall show them that difference.++**

 _With that, the Emperor turned to the Custodes behind him, and to the Sisters of Silence, gesturing to them to ready his ship._

" _Where to first, Father?"_

 _The Emperor looked to Roboute._

 _In response he simply pointed with the unsheathed sword that erupted once more into flame, a lance of light. Without a word, the sons nodded, and then their Father said:_

 **++But first, we plan the strike to destroy this.++**

 _The Emperor remained serene, and the sorrows of centuries fell from Him with each word that followed:_

 **++It has been too long since I went with my armies and my sons to war.++** _With that, He gestured and they followed Him, heading to the old centers of the War Council on Terra, each of them anxious and nervous by degrees. Since the death of Horus, the Master of Mankind had been withdrawn, and the Imperium had changed greatly. Now, He had returned._

 _What grave changes would ensue now?_


End file.
